From Extractive to Abstractive Summarization: A Journey

Abstract

The availability of large documentsummary corpora have opened up new possibilities for using statistical text generation techniques for abstractive summarization. Progress in Extractive text summarization has become stagnant for a while now and in this work we compare the two possible alternates to it. We present an argument in favor of abstractive summarization compared to an ensemble of extractive techniques. Further we explore the possibility of using statistical machine translation as a generative text summarization technique and present possible research questions in this direction. We also report our initial findings and future direction of research.