News summarizer (DistilBART)
This is a straightforward “abstractive” English news summarizer fine-tuned from the DistilBART CNN/DailyMail checkpoint (sshleifer/distilbart-cnn-12-6). The main appeal is practicality: DistilBART is small enough to run cheaply and quickly, which makes it a decent fit for API-style summarization where throughput and latency matter more than squeezing out the last bit of quality.
Caveats before using it in a product:
- AGPL-3.0 license (strong copyleft implications for commercial use).
- Truncation is still required for long inputs (the model card’s example uses
max_length=1024, but you’ll likely want to tune this based on your own context length and latency/quality trade-offs). - The DistilBART CNN/DailyMail lineage can bias summary style and topic coverage.
If you want to evaluate it quickly, load it with Transformers and run a small batch of your own news articles, then compare its compression ratio and factual drift against your current baseline summarizer.
Quick stats from the listing feed: pipeline: summarization · 721 downloads.
Source listing: https://huggingface.co/models?sort=modified