Learning to Generate Popular Headlines

Headlines are not only essential for summarizing news articles but also for grabbing users’ attention. Headline generation is a type of text summarization that can employ either an extractive or abstractive approach, with the latter being more prevalent through deep learning models. However, creating a popular headline that can capture readers’ attention is challenging. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid headline generation approach that utilizes state-of-the-art transformer models to generate several headline variations for an article. Additionally, we use a model for predicting headline popularity that can choose the most popular headline from the generated ones. We also create a new dataset for predicting headline popularity by scraping Twitter accounts of news media. Our evaluation shows that fine-tuning summarization models for the headline generation task can significantly improve their performance. We also demonstrate that our proposed method can generate more popular headlines compared to the baseline methods that do not incorporate popularity prediction. For such an evaluation purpose, we create a popularity benchmark to automatically assess the effectiveness of our proposed headline generation approach in generating popular headlines.