# Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization

**Authors:** Shashi Narayan, Shay B. Cohen, Mirella Lapata  
**arXiv:** [1808.08745](https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08745)  
**Date:** 2018-08-27  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/fr/paper/1808.08745v1/

## Abstract

We introduce extreme summarization, a new single-document summarization task which does not favor extractive strategies and calls for an abstractive modeling approach. The idea is to create a short, one-sentence news summary answering the question "What is the article about?". We collect a real-world, large-scale dataset for this task by harvesting online articles from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). We propose a novel abstractive model which is conditioned on the article's topics and based entirely on convolutional neural networks. We demonstrate experimentally that this architecture captures long-range dependencies in a document and recognizes pertinent content, outperforming an oracle extractive system and state-of-the-art abstractive approaches when evaluated automatically and by humans.