An extract-then-abstract based method to generate disaster-news headlines using a DNN extractor followed by a transformer abstractor

Generating news headlines has been one of the predominant problems in Natural Language Processing research. Modern transformer models, if fine-tuned, can present a good headline with attention to all the parts of a disaster-news article. A disaster-news headline generally focuses on the event, its effect, and the major impacts, which a transformer model lacks when generating the headline. The extract-then-abstract based method proposed in this article improves the performance of a state-of-the-art transformer abstractor to generate a good-quality disaster-news headline. In this work, a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based sentence extractor and a transformer-based abstractive summarizer work sequentially to generate a headline. The sentence extraction task is formulated as a binary classification problem where the DNN model is trained to generate two binary labels: one corresponding to the sentence similarity with ground truth headlines and the other corresponding to the presence of disaster and its impact related information in the sentence. The transformer model generates the headline from the sentences extracted by the DNN. ROUGE scores of the headlines generated using the proposed method are found to be better than the scores of the headlines generated directly from the original documents. The highest ROUGE 1, 2, and 3 score improvements are observed in the case of the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model by 17.85%, 38.13%, and 21.01%, respectively. Such improvements suggest that the proposed method can have a high utility for finding effective headlines from disaster related news articles.