  An abstract must not change the meaning of the original text. A single most
effective way to achieve that is to increase the amount of copying while still
allowing for text abstraction. Human editors can usually exercise control over
copying, resulting in summaries that are more extractive than abstractive, or
vice versa. However, it remains poorly understood whether modern neural
abstractive summarizers can provide the same flexibility, i.e., learning from
single reference summaries to generate multiple summary hypotheses with varying
degrees of copying. In this paper, we present a neural summarization model
that, by learning from single human abstracts, can produce a broad spectrum of
summaries ranging from purely extractive to highly generative ones. We frame
the task of summarization as language modeling and exploit alternative
mechanisms to generate summary hypotheses. Our method allows for control over
copying during both training and decoding stages of a neural summarization
model. Through extensive experiments we illustrate the significance of our
proposed method on controlling the amount of verbatim copying and achieve
competitive results over strong baselines. Our analysis further reveals
interesting and unobvious facts.
