How well do you know your summarization datasets?
Not on the map. Why?
Abstract (arXiv)
State-of-the-art summarization systems are trained and evaluated on massive datasets scraped from the web. Despite their prevalence, we know very little about the underlying characteristics (data noise, summarization complexity, etc.) of these datasets, and how these affect system performance and the reliability of automatic metrics like ROUGE. In this study, we manually analyze 600 samples from three popular summarization datasets. Our study is driven by a six-class typology which captures different noise types (missing facts, entities) and degrees of summarization difficulty (extractive, abstractive). We follow with a thorough analysis of 27 state-of-the-art summarization models and 5 popular metrics, and report our key insights: (1) Datasets have distinct data quality and complexity distributions, which can be traced back to their collection process. (2) The performance of models and reliability of metrics is dependent on sample complexity. (3) Faithful summaries often receive low scores because of the poor diversity of references. We release the code, annotated data and model outputs.
Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2021.
Builds on
44 of 53 references.
References · 44
- 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,893
- 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,512
- 2018Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarizationcited by 1,317
- 2017Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networkscited by 1,292
- 2019PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 1,102
- 2015Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehendcited by 1,049
- 2016Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyondcited by 812
- 2020SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluationcited by 674
- 2019Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generationcited by 670
- 2019Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarizationcited by 584
- 2019Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoderscited by 556
- 2019MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distancecited by 418
32 more
- 2015A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarizationcited by 396
- 2018Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategiescited by 294
- 2016SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documentscited by 246
- 2020ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-trainingcited by 222
- 2018WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Datasetcited by 204
- 2019Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluationcited by 189
- 2020Extractive Summarization as Text Matchingcited by 189
- 2018Bottom-Up Abstractive Summarizationcited by 177
- 2019BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarizationcited by 156
- 2020Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarizationcited by 145
- 2017Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarizationcited by 141
- 2020GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarizationcited by 129
- 2018Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learningcited by 128
- 2019Fine-tune BERT for Extractive Summarizationcited by 122
- 2020BLEU might be Guilty but References are not Innocentcited by 110
- 2018Abstractive Summarization of Reddit Posts with Multi-level Memory Networkscited by 102
- 2020Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Extractive Document Summarizationcited by 91
- 2016A Thorough Examination of the CNN/Daily Mail Reading Comprehension Taskcited by 72
- 2021Can We Automate Scientific Reviewing?cited by 63
- 2016A Convolutional Encoder Model for Neural Machine Translationcited by 54
- 2018Deep Communicating Agents for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 50
- 2016Neural Network-Based Abstract Generation for Opinions and Argumentscited by 46
- 2018BanditSum: Extractive Summarization as a Contextual Banditcited by 46
- 2019Searching for Effective Neural Extractive Summarization: What Works and What's Nextcited by 38
- 2019Earlier Isn't Always Better: Sub-aspect Analysis on Corpus and System Biases in Summarizationcited by 28
- 2021RefSum: Refactoring Neural Summarizationcited by 25
- 2018A Qualitative Comparison of CoQA, SQuAD 2.0 and QuACcited by 22
- 2019A Closer Look at Data Bias in Neural Extractive Summarization Modelscited by 18
- 2019Controlling the Amount of Verbatim Copying in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 17
- 2020CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systemscited by 17
- 2019BiSET: Bi-directional Selective Encoding with Template for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 8
- 2020Learning by Semantic Similarity Makes Abstractive Summarization Bettercited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 6; 2023: 1; 2024: 5; 2025: 3.
16 papers.
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- 2024Are We Done with MMLU?cited by 194
- 2022Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarizationcited by 92
- 2022An Empirical Survey on Long Document Summarization: Datasets, Models and Metricscited by 74
- 2022SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Waycited by 50
- 2022How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization?cited by 25
- 2024ACLSum: A New Dataset for Aspect-based Summarization of Scientific Publicationscited by 20
- 2025Evaluating Small Language Models for News Summarization: Implications and Factors Influencing Performancecited by 12
- 2021CaPE: Contrastive Parameter Ensembling for Reducing Hallucination in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 11
- 2023Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarizationcited by 9
- 2022DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Interventioncited by 8
- 2024Information-Theoretic Distillation for Reference-less Summarizationcited by 6
- 2024HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrewcited by 6
4 more
- 2024The State and Fate of Summarization Datasets: A Surveycited by 3
- 2022Statistical Dataset Evaluation: Reliability, Difficulty, and Validitycited by 2
- 2025Early Detection and Reduction of Memorisation for Domain Adaptation and Instruction Tuningcited by 1
- 2025Leveraging Digitized Newspapers to Collect Summarization Data in Low-Resource Languagescited by 0
- 2025Leveraging Digitized Newspapers to Collect Summarization Data in Low-Resource Languages18 Nov 2025
- 2025Early Detection and Reduction of Memorisation for Domain Adaptation and Instruction Tuning13 Oct 2025
- 2025Evaluating Small Language Models for News Summarization: Implications and Factors Influencing Performance2 Feb 2025
- 2024The State and Fate of Summarization Datasets: A Survey7 Nov 2024
- 2024Are We Done with MMLU?6 Jun 2024
- 2024HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrew6 Jun 2024
- 2024Information-Theoretic Distillation for Reference-less Summarization20 Mar 2024
- 2024ACLSum: A New Dataset for Aspect-based Summarization of Scientific Publications8 Mar 2024
- 2023Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarization3 May 2023
- 2022Statistical Dataset Evaluation: Reliability, Difficulty, and Validity19 Dec 2022
- 2022Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarization15 Nov 2022
- 2022How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization?30 Oct 2022
4 more
- 2022An Empirical Survey on Long Document Summarization: Datasets, Models and Metrics3 Jul 2022
- 2022SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Way23 May 2022
- 2022DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Intervention25 Feb 2022
- 2021CaPE: Contrastive Parameter Ensembling for Reducing Hallucination in Abstractive Summarization14 Oct 2021
- 2024Are We Done with MMLU?cited by 194
- 2022Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarizationcited by 92
- 2022An Empirical Survey on Long Document Summarization: Datasets, Models and Metricscited by 74
- 2022SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Waycited by 50
- 2022How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization?cited by 25
- 2024ACLSum: A New Dataset for Aspect-based Summarization of Scientific Publicationscited by 20
- 2025Evaluating Small Language Models for News Summarization: Implications and Factors Influencing Performancecited by 12
- 2021CaPE: Contrastive Parameter Ensembling for Reducing Hallucination in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 11
- 2023Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarizationcited by 9
- 2022DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Interventioncited by 8
- 2024Information-Theoretic Distillation for Reference-less Summarizationcited by 6
- 2024HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrewcited by 6
12 most cited of 16 All 16 (JSON)
- 2025Leveraging Digitized Newspapers to Collect Summarization Data in Low-Resource Languages18 Nov 2025
- 2025Early Detection and Reduction of Memorisation for Domain Adaptation and Instruction Tuning13 Oct 2025
- 2025Evaluating Small Language Models for News Summarization: Implications and Factors Influencing Performance2 Feb 2025
- 2024The State and Fate of Summarization Datasets: A Survey7 Nov 2024
- 2024Are We Done with MMLU?6 Jun 2024
- 2024HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrew6 Jun 2024
- 2024Information-Theoretic Distillation for Reference-less Summarization20 Mar 2024
- 2024ACLSum: A New Dataset for Aspect-based Summarization of Scientific Publications8 Mar 2024
- 2023Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarization3 May 2023
- 2022Statistical Dataset Evaluation: Reliability, Difficulty, and Validity19 Dec 2022
- 2022Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Large Language Models Through News Summarization15 Nov 2022
- 2022How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization?30 Oct 2022
12 newest of 16 All 16 (JSON)