mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Exploring Neural Models for Query-Focused Summarization

arXiv 2112.07637 ↗First posted 14 Dec 2021cs.CLcited by 44

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to produce summaries that answer particular questions of interest, enabling greater user control and personalization. While recently released datasets, such as QMSum or AQuaMuSe, facilitate research efforts in QFS, the field lacks a comprehensive study of the broad space of applicable modeling methods. In this paper we conduct a systematic exploration of neural approaches to QFS, considering two general classes of methods: two-stage extractive-abstractive solutions and end-to-end models. Within those categories, we investigate existing models and explore strategies for transfer learning. We also present two modeling extensions that achieve state-of-the-art performance on the QMSum dataset, up to a margin of 3.38 ROUGE-1, 3.72 ROUGE2, and 3.28 ROUGE-L when combined with transfer learning strategies. Results from human evaluation suggest that the best models produce more comprehensive and factually consistent summaries compared to a baseline model. Code and checkpoints are made publicly available: https://github.com/salesforce/query-focused-sum.

Key facts. Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2021.

Builds on

44 of 63 references.

References · 44

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  3. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,372
  4. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  5. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,893
  6. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,824
  7. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,413
  8. 2019HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processingcited by 2,218
  9. 2020Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequencescited by 1,684
  10. 2018Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarizationcited by 1,317
  11. 2020Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 1,210
  12. 2019PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 1,102
32 more
  1. 2016Training Deep Nets with Sublinear Memory Costcited by 848
  2. 2020SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluationcited by 674
  3. 2018A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documentscited by 478
  4. 2019Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Modelcited by 431
  5. 2021QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarizationcited by 365
  6. 2021Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarizationcited by 345
  7. 2018Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequencescited by 335
  8. 2019Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluationcited by 189
  9. 2021BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarizationcited by 184
  10. 2018Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewritingcited by 158
  11. 2019BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarizationcited by 156
  12. 2019Hierarchical Transformers for Multi-Document Summarizationcited by 132
  13. 2021SummScreen: A Dataset for Abstractive Screenplay Summarizationcited by 79
  14. 2021DialogLM: Pre-trained Model for Long Dialogue Understanding and Summarizationcited by 72
  15. 2021Summ^N: A Multi-Stage Summarization Framework for Long Input Dialogues and Documentscited by 65
  16. 2020Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentationcited by 53
  17. 2020AQuaMuSe: Automatically Generating Datasets for Query-Based Multi-Document Summarizationcited by 42
  18. 2018Query Focused Abstractive Summarization: Incorporating Query Relevance, Multi-Document Coverage, and Summary Length Constraints into seq2seq Modelscited by 39
  19. 2021DYLE: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Long-Input Summarizationcited by 34
  20. 2021An Exploratory Study on Long Dialogue Summarization: What Works and What's Nextcited by 28
  21. 2020Generating Query Focused Summaries from Query-Free Resourcescited by 27
  22. 2019Joint Learning of Answer Selection and Answer Summary Generation in Community Question Answeringcited by 25
  23. 2021Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Modelscited by 24
  24. 2019Generating Summaries with Topic Templates and Structured Convolutional Decoderscited by 20
  25. 2020SEAL: Segment-wise Extractive-Abstractive Long-form Text Summarizationcited by 15
  26. 2021Improve Query Focused Abstractive Summarization by Incorporating Answer Relevancecited by 15
  27. 2021HETFORMER: Heterogeneous Transformer with Sparse Attention for Long-Text Extractive Summarizationcited by 13
  28. 2021AnswerSumm: A Manually-Curated Dataset and Pipeline for Answer Summarizationcited by 10
  29. 2021Text Summarization with Latent Queriescited by 8
  30. 2020Conditional Self-Attention for Query-based Summarizationcited by 6
  31. 2021Dynamic Sliding Window for Meeting Summarizationcited by 3
  32. 2021Sparsity and Sentence Structure in Encoder-Decoder Attention of Summarization Systemscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 7; 2023: 14; 2024: 11; 2025: 5; 2026: 6.

44 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2024Summary of a Haystack: A Challenge to Long-Context LLMs and RAG Systemscited by 87
  2. 2022Efficient Long-Text Understanding with Short-Text Modelscited by 71
  3. 2023Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarizationcited by 69
  4. 2022SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Waycited by 50
  5. 2024Learning to Plan and Generate Text with Citationscited by 28
  6. 2022OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarizationcited by 24
  7. 2021Domain Adaptation with Pre-trained Transformers for Query Focused Abstractive Text Summarizationcited by 21
  8. 2022Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Text Models for Long Text Sequencescited by 21
  9. 2022Socratic Pretraining: Question-Driven Pretraining for Controllable Summarizationcited by 17
  10. 2023SciReviewGen: A Large-scale Dataset for Automatic Literature Review Generationcited by 17
  11. 2023Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review: A Benchmarkcited by 11
  12. 2024Say More with Less: Understanding Prompt Learning Behaviors through Gist Compressioncited by 8
32 more
  1. 2023PDSum: Prototype-driven Continuous Summarization of Evolving Multi-document Sets Streamcited by 7
  2. 2023CQSumDP: A ChatGPT-Annotated Resource for Query-Focused Abstractive Summarization Based on Debatepediacited by 7
  3. 2023Concise Answers to Complex Questions: Summarization of Long-form Answerscited by 7
  4. 2023Towards Diverse and Effective Question-Answer Pair Generation from Children Storybookscited by 5
  5. 2022SumREN: Summarizing Reported Speech about Events in Newscited by 4
  6. 2023Learning to Rank Utterances for Query-Focused Meeting Summarizationcited by 4
  7. 2023QontSum: On Contrasting Salient Content for Query-focused Summarizationcited by 4
  8. 2024On The Persona-based Summarization of Domain-Specific Documentscited by 4
  9. 2025GenerationPrograms: Fine-grained Attribution with Executable Programscited by 4
  10. 2025OpinioRAG: Towards Generating User-Centric Opinion Highlights from Large-scale Online Reviewscited by 4
  11. 2022Meeting Summarization: A Survey of the State of the Artcited by 3
  12. 2023Query-Utterance Attention with Joint modeling for Query-Focused Meeting Summarizationcited by 3
  13. 2024Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarizationcited by 3
  14. 2024StructTest: Benchmarking LLMs' Reasoning through Compositional Structured Outputscited by 3
  15. 2025Scaling Multi-Document Event Summarization: Evaluating Compression vs. Full-Text Approachescited by 3
  16. 2026Finding What Matters: Anchoring Context Knowledge with Evolving Indices for Iterative Retrievalcited by 3
  17. 2023Surveying the Landscape of Text Summarization with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 2
  18. 2023Instructive Dialogue Summarization with Query Aggregationscited by 2
  19. 2024Label-Free Topic-Focused Summarization Using Query Augmentationcited by 2
  20. 2024IDEAL: Leveraging Infinite and Dynamic Characterizations of Large Language Models for Query-focused Summarizationcited by 2
  21. 2025MedTrust-RAG: Evidence Verification and Trust Alignment for Biomedical Question Answeringcited by 2
  22. 2023Generating Query Focused Summaries without Fine-tuning the Transformer-based Pre-trained Modelscited by 1
  23. 2023Improving Query-Focused Meeting Summarization with Query-Relevant Knowledgecited by 1
  24. 2024Exploring Iterative Controllable Summarization with Large Language Modelscited by 1
  25. 2024Query-Guided Self-Supervised Summarization of Nursing Notescited by 0
  26. 2024Does This Summary Answer My Question? Modeling Query-Focused Summary Readers with Rational Speech Actscited by 0
  27. 2025PreSumm: Predicting Summarization Performance Without Summarizingcited by 0
  28. 2026Where Does Robustness Live? Neuron-Guided Adaptation for Retrieval-Augmented Language Modelscited by 0
  29. 2026Segment-level Tree Search for Long Meeting Document Summarizationcited by 0
  30. 2026Query-Focused Event Summarization: A Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 0
  31. 2026Information Satisfaction: A Reader-Centered Axis for Summarization Evaluationcited by 0
  32. 2026Retrieved-Span Training for Efficient Query-Focused Meeting Summarization on QMSumcited by 0