Abstractive headline generation using WIDL-expressions

We present a new paradigm for the automatic creation of document headlines that is based on direct transformation of relevant textual information into well-formed textual output. Starting from an input document, we automatically create compact representations of weighted finite sets of strings, called WIDL-expressions, which encode the most important topics in the document. A generic natural language generation engine performs the headline generation task, driven by both statistical knowledge encapsulated in WIDL-expressions (representing topic biases induced by the input document) and statistical knowledge encapsulated in language models (representing biases induced by the target language). Our evaluation shows similar performance in quality with a state-of-the-art, extractive approach to headline generation, and significant improvements in quality over previously proposed solutions to abstractive headline generation.