Generic text summarization approaches often fail to address the specific intent and needs of individual users. Recently, scholarly attention has turned to the development of summarization methods that are more closely tailored and controlled to align with specific objectives and user needs. While a growing corpus of research is devoted towards a more controllable summarization, there is no comprehensive survey available that thoroughly explores the diverse controllable aspects or attributes employed in this context, delves into the associated challenges, and investigates the existing solutions. In this survey, we formalize the Controllable Text Summarization (CTS) task, categorize controllable aspects according to their shared characteristics and objectives, and present a thorough examination of existing methods and datasets within each category. Moreover, based on our findings, we uncover limitations and research gaps, while also delving into potential solutions and future directions for CTS.

翻译：通用文本摘要方法往往难以满足个体用户的特定意图与需求。近年来，学界开始聚焦于开发更贴合特定目标与用户需求的摘要生成方法。尽管针对可控摘要的研究日益增多，但目前尚无全面综述系统梳理该领域采用的可控维度或属性、深入探讨相关挑战并考察现有解决方案。本综述中，我们形式化定义了可控文本摘要（CTS）任务，根据可控维度的共性特征与目标对其进行分类，并对每类中的现有方法与数据集进行了详尽考察。此外，基于研究发现，我们揭示了当前研究的局限性与空白，同时探讨了CTS的潜在解决方案与未来方向。