Text summarization method of argumentative discourse by combining the BERT-transformer model

Summarization of texts have been considered as essential practice nowadays with the careful presentation of the main ideas of a text. The current study aims to provide a methodology of summarizing complex texts such as argumentative discourse. Extractive and abstractive summarization techniques have recently gained significant attention. Each has its own limitations that reduce efficiency in the coverage of the main points of the summary, but by combining them, we can use the positive points of each to improve both summarization performance and summary generation quality. This paper presents a novel extractive-abstractive text summarization method that ensures coverage of the main points of the entire text. It is based on combining Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and transfer learning. Using a dataset comprising two UK parliamentary debates, the study shows that the proposed method effectively summarizes the main points. Comparing extractive and abstractive summarization, the experiment used Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) sets of metrics and achieved scores of 30.1, 9.60, and 27.9 for the first debate, and 36.2, 11.80, and 31.5 for the second, using ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L metrics, respectively.