  Neural extractive summarization models usually employ a hierarchical encoder
for document encoding and they are trained using sentence-level labels, which
are created heuristically using rule-based methods. Training the hierarchical
encoder with these \emph{inaccurate} labels is challenging. Inspired by the
recent work on pre-training transformer sentence encoders
\cite{devlin:2018:arxiv}, we propose {\sc Hibert} (as shorthand for {\bf
HI}erachical {\bf B}idirectional {\bf E}ncoder {\bf R}epresentations from {\bf
T}ransformers) for document encoding and a method to pre-train it using
unlabeled data. We apply the pre-trained {\sc Hibert} to our summarization
model and it outperforms its randomly initialized counterpart by 1.25 ROUGE on
the CNN/Dailymail dataset and by 2.0 ROUGE on a version of New York Times
dataset. We also achieve the state-of-the-art performance on these two
datasets.
