Improving the readability and saliency of abstractive text summarization using combination of deep neural networks equipped with auxiliary attention mechanism

Rapid and exponential development of textual data in recent years has yielded to the need for automatic text summarization models which aim to automatically condense a piece of text into a shorter version. Although various unsupervised and machine learning-based approaches have been introduced for text summarization during the last decades, the emergence of deep learning has made remarkable progress in this field. However, deep learning-based text summarization models are still in their early steps of development and their potential has yet to be fully explored. Accordingly, a novel abstractive summarization model is proposed in this paper which utilized the combination of convolutional neural network and long short-term memory integrated with auxiliary attention in its encoder to increase the saliency and coherency of generated summaries. The proposed model was validated on CNN\Daily Mail and DUC-2004 datasets and empirical results indicated that not only the proposed model outperformed existing models in terms of ROUGE metric but also its generated summaries had higher saliency and readability compared to the baseline model according to human evaluation.