Improving factual consistency in abstractive summarization has been a focus of current research. One promising approach is the post-editing method. However, previous works have yet to make sufficient use of factual factors in summaries and suffers from the negative effect of the training datasets. In this paper, we first propose a novel factual error correction model FactCloze based on a conditional-generation cloze task. FactCloze can construct the causality among factual factors while being able to determine whether the blank can be answered or not. Then, we propose a data distillation method to generate a more faithful summarization dataset SummDSC via multiple-dimensional evaluation. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of our approach, which leads to an improvement in multiple factual consistency metrics compared to baselines.

The issue of factual consistency in abstractive summarization has received extensive attention in recent years, and the evaluation of factual consistency between summary and document has become an important and urgent task. Most of the current evaluation metrics are adopted from the question answering (QA) or natural language inference (NLI) task. However, the application of QA-based metrics is extremely time-consuming in practice while NLI-based metrics are lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a cloze-based evaluation framework called ClozE and show the great potential of the cloze-based metric. It inherits strong interpretability from QA, while maintaining the speed of NLI- level reasoning. We demonstrate that ClozE can reduce the evaluation time by nearly 96% relative to QA-based metrics while retaining their interpretability and performance through experiments on six human-annotated datasets and a meta-evaluation benchmark GO FIGURE (Gabriel et al., 2021). Finally, we discuss three important facets of ClozE in practice, which further shows better overall performance of ClozE compared to other metrics.