  Forum threads are lengthy and rich in content. Concise thread summaries will
benefit both newcomers seeking information and those who participate in the
discussion. Few studies, however, have examined the task of forum thread
summarization. In this work we make the first attempt to adapt the hierarchical
attention networks for thread summarization. The model draws on the recent
development of neural attention mechanisms to build sentence and thread
representations and use them for summarization. Our results indicate that the
proposed approach can outperform a range of competitive baselines. Further, a
redundancy removal step is crucial for achieving outstanding results.
