A quality headline with a high click-rate should not only summarize the content of an article, but also reflect a style that attracts users. Such demand has drawn rising attention to the task of stylistic headline generation (SHG). An intuitive method is to first generate plain headlines leveraged by document-headline parallel data then transfer them to a target style. However, this inevitably suffers from error propagation. Therefore, to unify the two sub-tasks and explicitly decompose style-relevant attributes and summarize content, we propose an end-to-end stage-wise SHG model containing the style generation component and the content insertion component, where the former generates stylistic-relevant intermediate outputs and the latter receives these outputs then inserts the summarized content. The intermediate outputs are observable, making the style generation easy to control. Our system is comprehensively evaluated by both quantitative and qualitative metrics, and it achieves state-of-the-art results in SHG over three different stylistic datasets.

Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) is a task that extracts important information from a source document and summarizes it into a summary in another language. It is a challenging task that requires a system to understand, summarize, and translate at the same time, making it highly related to Monolingual Summarization (MS) and Machine Translation (MT). In practice, the training resources for Machine Translation are far more than that for cross-lingual and monolingual summarization. Thus incorporating the Machine Translation corpus into CLS would be beneficial for its performance. However, the present work only leverages a simple multi-task framework to bring Machine Translation in, lacking deeper exploration.