TL;DR: Mining Reddit to Learn Automatic Summarization

Recent advances in automatic text summarization have used deep neural networks to generate high-quality abstractive summaries, but the performance of these models strongly depends on large amounts of suitable training data. We propose a new method for mining social media for author-provided summaries, taking advantage of the common practice of appending a “TL;DR” to long posts. A case study using a large Reddit crawl yields the WebisTLDR-17 corpus, complementing existing corpora primarily from the news genre. Our technique is likely applicable to other social media sites and general web crawls.