  Traditional approaches to extractive summarization rely heavily on
human-engineered features. In this work we propose a data-driven approach based
on neural networks and continuous sentence features. We develop a general
framework for single-document summarization composed of a hierarchical document
encoder and an attention-based extractor. This architecture allows us to
develop different classes of summarization models which can extract sentences
or words. We train our models on large scale corpora containing hundreds of
thousands of document-summary pairs. Experimental results on two summarization
datasets demonstrate that our models obtain results comparable to the state of
the art without any access to linguistic annotation.
