Siamese hierarchical attention networks for extractive summarization

Abstract

In this paper, we present an extractive approach to document summarization based on Siamese Neural Networks. Specifically, we propose the use of Hierarchical Attention Networks to select the most relevant sentences of a text to make its summary. We train Siamese Neural Networks using document-summary pairs to determine whether the summary is appropriated for the document or not. By means of a sentence-level attention mechanism the most relevant sentences in the document can be identified. Hence, once the network is trained, it can be used to generate extractive summaries. The experimentation carried out using the CNN/DailyMail summarization corpus shows the adequacy of the proposal. In summary, we propose a novel end-to-end neural network to address extractive summarization as a binary classification problem which obtains promising results in-line with the state-of-the-art on the CNN/DailyMail corpus.