Make Lead Bias in Your Favor: A Simple and Effective Method for News Summarization

Lead bias is a common phenomenon in news summarization, where early parts of an article often contain the most salient information. While many algorithms exploit this fact in summary generation, it has a detrimental effect on teaching the model to discriminate and extract important information. We propose that the lead bias can be leveraged in a simple and effective way in our favor to pretrain abstractive news summarization models on large-scale unlabeled corpus: predicting the leading sentences using the rest of an article. Via careful data cleaning and filtering, our transformer-based pretrained model without any finetuning achieves remarkable results over various news summarization tasks. With further finetuning, our model outperforms many competitive baseline models. Human evaluations further show the effectiveness of our method.