Papers › On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models

On Extractive and Abstractive Neural Document Summarization with Transformer Language Models

7 Sep 2019EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:1909.03186archive 2025-07-28

Sandeep Subramanian, Raymond Li, Jonathan Pilault, Christopher Pal

We present a method to produce abstractive summaries of long documents that exceed several thousand words via neural abstractive summarization. We perform a simple extractive step before generating a summary, which is then used to condition the transformer language model on relevant information before being tasked with generating a summary. We show that this extractive step significantly improves summarization results. We also show that this approach produces more abstractive summaries compared to prior work that employs a copy mechanism while still achieving higher rouge scores. Note: The abstract above was not written by the authors, it was generated by one of the models presented in this paper.

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convert_single_example Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/transfer_learning/preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 8b4900c56e32f11a · report
encoding_layer Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/Rnn_encoding_layer.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 3872fc8eb31e89eb · report
file_based_convert_examples_to_features Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/transfer_learning/preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · cd9f0332b1d8fafc · report
file_based_input_fn_builder Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/transfer_learning/preprocess.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 3d56dfd55a3825c2 · report
inference_decoding_layer Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/RNN_inference_decoding_layer.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 5dcbd82955f38694 · report
training_decoding_layer Bread-and-Code/Text-Summarization/Sam/RNN_training_decoding_layer.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · fccaf351e41b9588 · report

Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationDocument SummarizationLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingText Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text Summarization Arxiv HEP-TH citation graph TLM-I+E ROUGE-1 42.43 #22 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Arxiv HEP-TH citation graph Sent-PTR ROUGE-1 42.32 #23 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Arxiv HEP-TH citation graph Sent-CLF ROUGE-1 34.01 #27 of 28 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Pubmed Sent-CLF ROUGE-1 45.01 #19 of 29 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Pubmed Sent-PTR ROUGE-1 43.3 #23 of 29 Archive leaderboard report
Text Summarization Pubmed TLM-I+E ROUGE-1 41.43 #25 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.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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