Neural headline writer that sometimes copies your homework

What it does

This is a faithful reproduction of a 2015 arXiv paper on generating news headlines with recurrent neural networks. Feed it article ledes, train an RNN with attention in Keras, and it spits out headline-length summaries. The whole pipeline lives in Jupyter notebooks: build a GloVe-backed vocabulary, train the model, then generate text.

The interesting bit

The author added a practical twist the original paper skipped: out-of-vocabulary words get copied directly from the source article rather than mangled into nearest-neighbor gibberish. The attention visualization shows exactly which source words the model fixated on for each generated token — useful for debugging why your headline about trade policy suddenly mentions “avocados.”

Key highlights

• Attention mechanism with weight visualization
• Copy mechanism for OOV words (not in the original paper)
• GloVe embeddings for initialization
• ~684K training examples used by the author
• Pure Keras/Jupyter workflow, no hidden framework magic

Caveats

• Requires you to already have tokenized article/headline pairs in a pickle file; no data downloader included
• The showcased examples are explicitly cherry-picked — the README admits this
• python-Levenshtein dependency for unclear reasons (not explained)
• Keras circa 2015; modern TensorFlow/PyTorch users will need patience

Verdict

Worth a look if you’re teaching or studying classic seq2seq+attention architectures, or need a baseline to beat. Skip it if you want production-ready abstractive summarization — this is a paper reproduction with training wheels, not a maintained library.