We present two novel and contrasting Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based architectures for extractive summarization of documents. The Classifier based architecture sequentially accepts or rejects each sentence in the original document order for its membership in the summary. The Selector architecture, on the other hand, is free to pick one sentence at a time in any arbitrary order to generate the extractive summary. @PARASPLIT Our models under both architectures jointly capture the notions of salience and redundancy of sentences. In addition, these models have the advantage of being very interpretable, since they allow visualization of their predictions broken up by abstract features such as information content, salience and redundancy. @PARASPLIT We show that our models reach or outperform state-of-the-art supervised models on two different corpora. We also recommend the conditions under which one architecture is superior to the other based on experimental evidence.
Traditional approaches to extractive summarization rely heavily on humanengineered features. In this work we propose a data-driven approach based on neural networks and continuous sentence features. We develop a general framework for single-document summarization composed of a hierarchical document encoder and an attention-based extractor. This architecture allows us to develop different classes of summarization models which can extract sentences or words. We train our models on large scale corpora containing hundreds of thousands of document-summary pairs 1 . Experimental results on two summarization datasets demonstrate that our models obtain results comparable to the state of the art without any access to linguistic annotation.