Papers › Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting

Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting

28 May 2018ACL 2018 7arXiv:1805.11080archive 2025-07-28

Yen-Chun Chen, Mohit Bansal

Inspired by how humans summarize long documents, we propose an accurate and fast summarization model that first selects salient sentences and then rewrites them abstractively (i.e., compresses and paraphrases) to generate a concise overall summary. We use a novel sentence-level policy gradient method to bridge the non-differentiable computation between these two neural networks in a hierarchical way, while maintaining language fluency. Empirically, we achieve the new state-of-the-art on all metrics (including human evaluation) on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset, as well as significantly higher abstractiveness scores. Moreover, by first operating at the sentence-level and then the word-level, we enable parallel decoding of our neural generative model that results in substantially faster (10-20x) inference speed as well as 4x faster training convergence than previous long-paragraph encoder-decoder models. We also demonstrate the generalization of our model on the test-only DUC-2002 dataset, where we achieve higher scores than a state-of-the-art model.

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ChenRocks/fast_abs_rl officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
johnnyb1509/2020_VBDI_DL mentioned on GitHubtf report
yunzhusong/AAAI20-PORLHG mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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configure_training ChenRocks/fast_abs_rl/train_full_rl.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 7189f6534350d1f5 · report
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Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationDecoderSentenceSentence ReWritingText Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + RL ROUGE-1 41.47 #33 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + RL ROUGE-2 18.72 #33 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + RL ROUGE-L 37.76 #33 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-1 40.88 #38 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-2 17.80 #38 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-L 38.54 #38 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail (Anonymized) rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-1 39.66 #7 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail (Anonymized) rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-2 15.85 #7 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail (Anonymized) rnn-ext + abs + RL + rerank ROUGE-L 37.34 #7 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

SPEED

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