Interleaved texts, where posts belonging to different threads occur in a sequence, commonly occur in online chat posts, so that it can be time-consuming to quickly obtain an overview of the discussions. Existing systems first disentangle the posts by threads and then extract summaries from those threads. A major issue with such systems is error propagation from the disentanglement component. While end-to-end trainable summarization system could obviate explicit disentanglement, such systems require a large amount of labeled data. To address this, we propose to pretrain an end-to-end trainable hierarchical encoder-decoder system using synthetic interleaved texts. We show that by fine-tuning on a real-world meeting dataset (AMI), such a system out-performs a traditional two-step system by 22%. We also compare against transformer models and observed that pretraining with synthetic data both the encoder and decoder outperforms the BertSumExtAbs transformer model which pretrains only the encoder on a large dataset.

In this work, we define the task of teaser generation and provide an evaluation benchmark and baseline systems for the process of generating teasers. A teaser is a short reading suggestion for an article that is illustrative and includes curiosity-arousing elements to entice potential readers to read particular news items. Teasers are one of the main vehicles for transmitting news to social media users. We compile a novel dataset of teasers by systematically accumulating tweets and selecting those that conform to the teaser definition. We have compared a number of neural abstractive architectures on the task of teaser generation and the overall best performing system is See et al. seq2seq with pointer network.