Generating abstractive summaries of Lithuanian news articles using a transformer model

Abstract

In this work, we train the first monolingual Lithuanian transformer model on a relatively large corpus of Lithuanian news articles and compare various output decoding algorithms for abstractive news summarization. Generated summaries are coherent and look impressive at the first glance. However, some of them contain misleading information that is not so easy to spot. We describe all the technical details and share our trained model and accompanying code in an online opensource repository, as well as some characteristic samples of the generated summaries.