Controllable Abstractive Summarization

Current models for document summarization ignore user preferences such as the desired length, style or entities that the user has a preference for. We present a neural summarization model that enables users to specify such high level attributes in order to control the shape of the final summaries to better suit their needs. With user input, we show that our system can produce high quality summaries that are true to user preference. Without user input, we can set the control variables automatically and outperform comparable state of the art summarization systems despite the relative simplicity of our model.