Dialect Diversity in Text Summarization on Twitter

Discussions on Twitter involve participation from different communities with different dialects and it is often necessary to summarize a large number of posts into a representative sample to provide a synopsis. Yet, any such representative sample should sufficiently portray the underlying dialect diversity to present the voices of different participating communities representing the dialects. Extractive summarization algorithms perform the task of constructing subsets that succinctly capture the topic of any given set of posts. However, we observe that there is dialect bias in the summaries generated by common summarization approaches, i.e., they often return summaries that under-represent certain dialects. The vast majority of existing “fair” summarization approaches require socially salient attribute labels (in this case, dialect) to ensure that the generated summary is fair with respect to the socially salient attribute. Nevertheless, in many applications, these labels do not exist. Furthermore, due to the ever-evolving nature of dialects in social media, it is unreasonable to label or accurately infer the dialect of every social media post. To correct for the dialect bias, we employ a framework that takes an existing text summarization algorithm as a blackbox and, using a small set of dialect-diverse sentences, returns a summary that is relatively more dialect-diverse. Crucially, this approach does not need the posts being summarized to have dialect labels, ensuring that the diversification process is independent of dialect classification/identification models. We show the efficacy of our approach on Twitter datasets containing posts written in dialects used by different social groups defined by race or gender; in all cases, our approach leads to improved dialect diversity compared to standard text summarization approaches.