Automatic Generation of Factual News Headlines in Finnish

Abstract

We present a novel approach to generating news headlines in Finnish for a given news story. We model this as a summarization task where a model is given a news article, and its task is to produce a concise headline describing the main topic of the article. Because there are no openly available GPT-2 models for Finnish, we will first build such a model using several corpora. The model is then fine-tuned for the headline generation task using a massive news corpus. The system is evaluated by 3 expert journalists working in a Finnish media house. The results showcase the usability of the presented approach as a headline suggestion tool to facilitate the news production process.