Papers › Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks

Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks

14 Apr 2017ACL 2017 7arXiv:1704.04368archive 2025-07-28

Abigail See, Peter J. Liu, Christopher D. Manning

Neural sequence-to-sequence models have provided a viable new approach for abstractive text summarization (meaning they are not restricted to simply selecting and rearranging passages from the original text). However, these models have two shortcomings: they are liable to reproduce factual details inaccurately, and they tend to repeat themselves. In this work we propose a novel architecture that augments the standard sequence-to-sequence attentional model in two orthogonal ways. First, we use a hybrid pointer-generator network that can copy words from the source text via pointing, which aids accurate reproduction of information, while retaining the ability to produce novel words through the generator. Second, we use coverage to keep track of what has been summarized, which discourages repetition. We apply our model to the CNN / Daily Mail summarization task, outperforming the current abstractive state-of-the-art by at least 2 ROUGE points.

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Code

Syntology Ran 30 of 64 code samples harvested from 11 repositories linked to this paper; 34 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 4 ran · honoured contract; 2 ran · violated contract; 4 ran · our draft was wrong; 20 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: community (archive-listed): 63 samples from 11 repositories, 29 ran; 1 identical to code first harvested elsewhere. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

39 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

abisee/pointer-generator officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report
Kumar-Tarun/summarization mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
NirmalenduPrakash/Document-Summarizer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
NirmalenduPrakash/DocumentSummarizer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
Paleontolog/pointer_summarizer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
WolfNiu/AdversarialDialogue mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
abisee/cnn-dailymail mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
apexmeister/PGN_pytorch_lightning mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
atulkum/pointer_summarizer mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
becxer/pointer-generator mentioned on GitHubtf report
danchern97/pointer_generator_pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
jiminsun/pointer-generator mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
krystalan/k-sportssum mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
lvyufeng/pointer_summarizer_mindspore mentioned on GitHubmindspore report
prashanth41/text-summarization mentioned on GitHubtfNOASSERTION report
rohithreddy024/Text-Summarizer-Pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
sanjeevkrn/teaser_generate mentioned on GitHubtf report
sblayush/Tensorflow-Attention mentioned on GitHubtf report
sblayush/summarization mentioned on GitHubtf report
wyu97/permgen mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
zide05/pointer-gen-fastnlp mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

64 samples harvested; 30 ran; 4 honoured the contract we drafted; 34 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

4ran · honoured contract
2ran · violated contract
4ran · our draft was wrong
20ran
34unverified

Licence: 44 of the 64 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

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Attention jiminsun/pointer-generator/models/model.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · cc3e0df6c9cadffc · report
AttnDecoder jiminsun/pointer-generator/models/model.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 6db9ed493ffd1554 · report
BahdanauAttention steph1793/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/model.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · a9fe6612eee87099 · report
Beam zide05/pointer-gen-fastnlp/model/model.py community (archive-listed) ran no licence file found · pointer only · d0573c4de7b89c13 · report
CopyGenerator Iwontbecreative/Abstractive-summarization-OpenNMT/onmt/modules/CopyGenerator.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · ca9aebae1c1d68f1 · report
DecoderLayer steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 1148acdcc26decf0 · report
Embedding steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) ran MIT (permissive) · 29f76cba1aca3bcc · report
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is_special jiminsun/pointer-generator/models/model.py community (archive-listed) ran · violated contract Apache-2.0 (permissive) · de3f061bc084a621 · report
point_wise_feed_forward_network steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · a3e63cd2c4334956 · report
positional_encoding steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract MIT (permissive) · 29af386f64351dae · report
postprocess jiminsun/pointer-generator/models/model.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · dbadcb9734ed8a55 · report
scaled_dot_product_attention steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract MIT (permissive) · 70c86dc3686d36b5 · report
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Attention sblayush/summarization/Attention/Attention.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 08757013b9c0d91c · report
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Decoder steph1793/Pointer_Transformer_Generator/transformer.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 56eb84acc4ebcc5b · report
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Decoder AIKevin/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/V1/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 7487de479c397feb · report
Decoder NirmalenduPrakash/DocumentSummarizer/summarizer_transformer.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · ba300493e52be625 · report
Decoder ishtoo1/Text-Summarization-using-Pointer-Generator-Model/PGNet/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 01cb6fd7f41d2de2 · report
Decoder rohithreddy024/Text-Summarizer-Pytorch/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · e5add5becd12d590 · report
Encoder steph1793/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · c58b5d53930c62fb · report
Encoder AIKevin/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/V1/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 762286af9d313a53 · report
Encoder NirmalenduPrakash/DocumentSummarizer/summarizer_transformer.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · ef64d9a0c8ba787c · report
Encoder rohithreddy024/Text-Summarizer-Pytorch/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · f664cec323a8ceaa · report
GeneratorPoint sanjeevkrn/teaser_generate/app/src/pointer_generator.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 0ec5816294d1bd2c · report
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Model rohithreddy024/Text-Summarizer-Pytorch/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · f3072d8c12f5efce · report
Norm NirmalenduPrakash/DocumentSummarizer/summarizer_transformer.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · c614959d211eacfc · report
PGN steph1793/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 07d7bfd65d0e3ef0 · report
PointerGenerator jiminsun/pointer-generator/models/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · d22a7696119671b9 · report
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ReduceState zide05/pointer-gen-fastnlp/model/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · da713dcec336840d · report
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Transformer NirmalenduPrakash/DocumentSummarizer/summarizer_transformer.py community (archive-listed) unverified no licence file found · pointer only · c89b7806c496fa46 · report
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_calc_final_dist AIKevin/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/V1/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 75edad4571dd5c56 · report
apply_mask_normalize AIKevin/Pointer_Generator_Summarizer/V1/model.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 7a475c976579453a · report
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get_angles identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · honoured contract fingerprinted licence of this copy not recorded · 7816c6d65ab55d8f · report

Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationDocument SummarizationExtractive Text SummarizationText Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-1 39.53 #47 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-2 17.28 #47 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-L 36.38 #47 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-1 39.53 #48 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-2 17.28 #48 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail PTGEN + Coverage ROUGE-L 36.38 #48 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Pointer-Generator + Coverage ROUGE-1 39.53 #49 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Abstractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Pointer-Generator + Coverage ROUGE-2 17.28 #49 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Document Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 ROUGE-1 40.34 #18 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Document Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 ROUGE-2 17.70 #18 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Document Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 ROUGE-L 36.57 #18 of 26 Archive leaderboard report
Extractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 baseline ROUGE-1 40.34 #13 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Extractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 baseline ROUGE-2 17.70 #13 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Extractive Text Summarization CNN / Daily Mail Lead-3 baseline ROUGE-L 36.57 #13 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Arxiv HEP-TH citation graph Pntr-Gen-Seq2Seq ROUGE-1 32.06 #28 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Pubmed Pntr-Gen-Seq2Seq ROUGE-1 35.86 #29 of 29 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.

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