Saudi Press

Saudi Arabia and the world
Thursday, Oct 02, 2025

Google’s SummAE AI generates abstract summaries of paragraphs

Google’s SummAE AI generates abstract summaries of paragraphs

Google researchers propose a novel AI summarization model - SummAE- capable of generating abstract summaries of paragraphs.
Machines have a tougher time summarizing text than you’d think, at least where the summarization is abstractive rather than extractive. While the extraction requires merely concatenating sentences, abstraction involves the task of paraphrasing using novel sentences. Progress has been made in the news domain recently, perhaps owing to the abundance of corpora on which algorithmic systems can be trained. But robust summarization of most other writing forms remains an unsolved problem.

Motivated by this, a team at Google Brain investigated an abstractive summarization system dubbed SummAE that’s largely unsupervised, meaning it’s able to generalize from a small amount of training data to unseen textual examples. While it couldn’t summarize beyond single five-sentence paragraphs, the researchers claim it “significantly” improves upon the baseline and represents a “major” step in the direction of human-level performance.


Machines have a tougher time summarizing text than you’d think, at least where the summarization is abstractive rather than extractive. While the extraction requires merely concatenating sentences, abstraction involves the task of paraphrasing using novel sentences. Progress has been made in the news domain recently, perhaps owing to the abundance of corpora on which algorithmic systems can be trained. But robust summarization of most other writing forms remains an unsolved problem.

Motivated by this, a team at Google Brain investigated an abstractive summarization system dubbed SummAE that’s largely unsupervised, meaning it’s able to generalize from a small amount of training data to unseen textual examples. While it couldn’t summarize beyond single five-sentence paragraphs, the researchers claim it “significantly” improves upon the baseline and represents a “major” step in the direction of human-level performance.

Recommended videosPowered by AnyClip
Go Eat A McRib
Play

Unmute
Duration
0:59
/
Current Time
0:17

Fullscreen
Up Next

NOW PLAYINGGo Eat A McRib
Scientists Discover What Makes 'Water Bears' Virtually Indestructible
Doctor diagnoses his own cancer with an app
There's A Bigger Danger To Pedestrians Than Walking While Distracted
Prince Harry to edit National Geographic's Instagram
The Secret Culprit Of America's Student Debt Crisis
5 Quotes About The Power of Books

The data set and code are freely available on GitHub, along with the configuration settings for the best model.

“As one of the very first works approaching single-document [abstract summarization], we propose a novel neural model — SummAE,” wrote the coauthors. “[We believe it] is therefore desirable to have models capable of automatically summarizing documents abstractively with little to no supervision.”

SummAE contains a denoising autoencoder that encodes (that is, generates numerical representations of) sentences and paragraphs of the target text in a shared space. Guided by a decoder whose input is prepended with a token signaling whether to decode a sentence or a paragraph, the system generates summaries by decoding each sentence from the encoded paragraphs.

The researchers discovered that most traditional approaches to training the auto-encoder resulted in long, multi-sentence summaries. To encourage it to learn higher-level concepts disentangled from their original expression, the team employed two denoising approaches — randomly masking tokens and permuting the order of sentences within paragraphs — that increased the number of training examples substantially. They also experimented with an adversarial critic component that could distinguish between sentences and paragraphs, in addition to two pretraining tasks that encouraged the encoder to learn how sentences narratively followed within a paragraph.

The researchers trained three different variations of SummAE on the ROCStories, a corpus of self-contained, diverse, non-technical, and concise prose. They split the original 98,159 training stories into three separate collections — a training set, a validation set, and a test set — and collected three human summaries each for 500 validation examples and 500 test examples.

After 100,000 training steps with pretraining, the team reports that the best model significantly outperformed a baseline extractive sentence generator on the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE), a set of metrics devised to evaluate automatic summarization. Moreover, they say that in a qualitative study involving evaluators recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, volunteers rated one of the three SummAE models’ summaries “fluent” and “information-relevant” 80% of the time.

“The paragraph reconstructions show some coherence, although with some disfluencies and factual inaccuracies that are common with neural generative models,” wrote the coauthors. “Since the summaries are decoded from the same latent vector as the reconstructions, improving them could lead to more accurate summaries.”
Newsletter

Related Articles

Saudi Press
0:00
0:00
Close
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
UK, Canada, and Australia Officially Recognise Palestine in Historic Shift
New Eye Drops Show Promise in Replacing Reading Glasses for Presbyopia
Dubai Property Boom Shows Strain as Flippers Get Buyer’s Remorse
Top AI Researchers Are Heading Back to China as U.S. Struggles to Keep Pace
JWST Data Brings TRAPPIST-1e Closer to Earth-Like Habitability
UAE-US Stargate Project Poised to Make Abu Dhabi a Global AI Powerhouse
Trump and Starmer Clash Over UK Recognition of Palestinian State Amid State Visit
Saudi Arabia cracks down on music ‘lounges’ after conservative backlash
Saudi Arabia Signs ‘Strategic Mutual Defence’ Pact with Pakistan, Marking First Arab State to Gain Indirect Access to Nuclear Strike Capabilities in the Region
Sam Altman sells the 'Wedding Estate' in Hawaii for 49 million dollars
Turkish car manufacturer Togg Enters German Market with 5-Star Electric Sedan and SUV to Challenge European EV Brands
World’s Longest Direct Flight China Eastern to Launch 29-Hour Shanghai–Buenos Aires Direct Flight via Auckland in December
New OpenAI Study Finds Majority of ChatGPT Use Is Personal, Not Professional
Kuwait opens bidding for construction of three cities to ease housing crunch.
This Week in AI: Meta’s Superintelligence Push, xAI’s Ten Billion-Dollar Raise, Genesis AI’s Robotics Ambitions, Microsoft Restructuring, Amazon’s Million-Robot Milestone, and Google’s AlphaGenome Update
Indian Student Engineers Propose “Project REBIRTH” to Protect Aircraft from Crashes Using AI, Airbags and Smart Materials
Could AI Nursing Robots Help Healthcare Staffing Shortages?
Turkish authorities seize leading broadcaster amid fraud and tax investigation
Qatari prime minister says Netanyahu ‘killed any hope’ for Israeli hostages
Apple Introduces Ultra-Thin iPhone Air, Enhanced 17 Series and New Health-Focused Wearables
Big Oil Slashes Jobs and Investments Amid Prolonged Low Crude Prices
Social Media Access Curtailed in Turkey After CHP Calls for Rallies Following Police Blockade of Istanbul Headquarters
Did the Houthis disrupt the internet in the Middle East? Submarine cables cut in the Red Sea
Gold Could Reach Nearly $5,000 if Fed Independence Is Undermined, Goldman Sachs Warns
Uruguay, Colombia and Paraguay Secure Places at 2026 World Cup
Trump Administration Advances Plans to Rebrand Pentagon as Department of War Instead of the Fake Term Department of Defense
Tether Expands into Gold Sector with Profit-Driven Diversification
Trump’s New War – and the ‘Drug Tyrant’ Fearing Invasion: ‘1,200 Missiles Aimed at Us’
At the Parade in China: Laser Weapons, 'Eagle Strike,' and a Missile Capable of 'Striking Anywhere in the World'
Information Warfare in the Age of AI: How Language Models Become Targets and Tools
Israeli Airstrike in Yemen Kills Houthi Prime Minister
After the Shock of Defeat, Iranians Yearn for Change
YouTube Altered Content by Artificial Intelligence – Without Permission
Iran Faces Escalating Water Crisis as Protests Spread
More Than Half a Million Evacuated as Typhoon Kajiki Heads for Vietnam
HSBC Switzerland Ends Relationships with Over 1,000 Clients from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Qatar, and Egypt
Sharia Law Made Legally Binding in Austria Despite Warnings Over 'Incompatible' Values
Dogfights in the Skies: Airbus on Track to Overtake Boeing and Claim Aviation Supremacy
Tim Cook Promises an AI Revolution at Apple: "One of the Most Significant Technologies of Our Generation"
Are AI Data Centres the Infrastructure of the Future or the Next Crisis?
Miles Worth Billions: How Airlines Generate Huge Profits
Zelenskyy Returns to White House Flanked by European Allies as Trump Pressures Land-Swap Deal with Putin
Beijing is moving into gold and other assets, diversifying away from the dollar
Cristiano Ronaldo Makes Surprise Stop at New Hong Kong Museum
Zelenskyy to Visit Washington after Trump–Putin Summit Yields No Agreement
×