  Neural encoder-decoder models have shown great success in many sequence
generation tasks. However, previous work has not investigated situations in
which we would like to control the length of encoder-decoder outputs. This
capability is crucial for applications such as text summarization, in which we
have to generate concise summaries with a desired length. In this paper, we
propose methods for controlling the output sequence length for neural
encoder-decoder models: two decoding-based methods and two learning-based
methods. Results show that our learning-based methods have the capability to
control length without degrading summary quality in a summarization task.
