Techniques for training for and performing abstractive text summarization are disclosed. Such techniques include, in some embodiments, obtaining textual content, and generating a reconstruction of the textual content using a trained language model, the reconstructed textual content comprising an abstractive summary of the textual content generated based on relative importance parameters associated with respective portions of the textual content. In some cases, the trained language model includes a neural network language model that has been trained by identifying a plurality of discrete portions of training textual content, receiving the plurality of discrete portions of the training textual content as input to the language model, and predicting relative importance parameters associated with respective ones of the plurality of discrete portions of the training textual content, the relative importance parameters each being based at least on one or more linguistic similarity measures with respect to a ground truth.