# WikiDes: A Wikipedia-Based Dataset for Generating Short Descriptions from Paragraphs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.13101 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13101/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09305/) (2018)
- [Extractive Summarization as Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08795/) (2020)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [BIGPATENT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Abstractive and Coherent Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03741/) (2019)
- [SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01890/) (2021)
- [Fine-tune BERT for Extractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10318/) (2019)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)
- [Factual Error Correction for Abstractive Summarization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08712/) (2020)
- [Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14235/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10070/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [DepressionEmo: A novel dataset for multilabel classification of depression emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04655/) (2024)
- [The State and Fate of Summarization Datasets: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04585/) (2024)
- [Lay Text Summarisation Using Natural Language Processing: A Narrative Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14222/) (2023)
- [Introducing Spotlight: A Novel Approach for Generating Captivating Key Information from Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10935/) (2025)
- [FormosanBench: Benchmarking Low-Resource Austronesian Languages in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21563/) (2025)
- [Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26595/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As free online encyclopedias with massive volumes of content, Wikipedia and Wikidata are key to many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, knowledge base building, machine translation, text classification, and text summarization. In this paper, we introduce WikiDes, a novel dataset to generate short descriptions of Wikipedia articles for the problem of text summarization. The dataset consists of over 80k English samples on 6987 topics. We set up a two-phase summarization method - description generation (Phase I) and candidate ranking (Phase II) - as a strong approach that relies on transfer and contrastive learning. For description generation, T5 and BART show their superiority compared to other small-scale pre-trained models. By applying contrastive learning with the diverse input from beam search, the metric fusion-based ranking models outperform the direct description generation models significantly up to 22 ROUGE in topic-exclusive split and topic-independent split. Furthermore, the outcome descriptions in Phase II are supported by human evaluation in over 45.33% chosen compared to 23.66% in Phase I against the gold descriptions. In the aspect of sentiment analysis, the generated descriptions cannot effectively capture all sentiment polarities from paragraphs while doing this task better from the gold descriptions. The automatic generation of new descriptions reduces the human efforts in creating them and enriches Wikidata-based knowledge graphs. Our paper shows a practical impact on Wikipedia and Wikidata since there are thousands of missing descriptions. Finally, we expect WikiDes to be a useful dataset for related works in capturing salient information from short paragraphs. The curated dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/WikiDes.