Controlling Length in Abstractive Summarization Using a Convolutional Neural Network

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have met great success in abstractive summarization, but they cannot effectively generate summaries of desired lengths. Because generated summaries are used in difference scenarios which may have space or length constraints, the ability to control the summary length in abstractive summarization is an important problem. In this paper, we propose an approach to constrain the summary length by extending a convolutional sequence to sequence model. The results show that this approach generates high-quality summaries with user defined length, and outperforms the baselines consistently in terms of ROUGE score, length variations and semantic similarity.