  In this paper, we introduce Iterative Text Summarization (ITS), an
iteration-based model for supervised extractive text summarization, inspired by
the observation that it is often necessary for a human to read an article
multiple times in order to fully understand and summarize its contents. Current
summarization approaches read through a document only once to generate a
document representation, resulting in a sub-optimal representation. To address
this issue we introduce a model which iteratively polishes the document
representation on many passes through the document. As part of our model, we
also introduce a selective reading mechanism that decides more accurately the
extent to which each sentence in the model should be updated. Experimental
results on the CNN/DailyMail and DUC2002 datasets demonstrate that our model
significantly outperforms state-of-the-art extractive systems when evaluated by
machines and by humans.
