  We present a method to produce abstractive summaries of long documents that
exceed several thousand words via neural abstractive summarization. We perform
a simple extractive step before generating a summary, which is then used to
condition the transformer language model on relevant information before being
tasked with generating a summary. We show that this extractive step
significantly improves summarization results. We also show that this approach
produces more abstractive summaries compared to prior work that employs a copy
mechanism while still achieving higher rouge scores. Note: The abstract above
was not written by the authors, it was generated by one of the models presented
in this paper.
