# On the State of German (Abstractive) Text Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.07095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03093/) (2020)
- [MLSUM: The Multilingual Summarization Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14900/) (2020)
- [Towards Question-Answering as an Automatic Metric for Evaluating the Content Quality of a Summary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00490/) (2020)
- [A Statistical Analysis of Summarization Evaluation Metrics using Resampling Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00054/) (2021)
- [Improving Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04623/) (2021)
- [Investigating Efficiently Extending Transformers for Long Input Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04347/) (2022)
- [EUR-Lex-Sum: A Multi- and Cross-lingual Dataset for Long-form Summarization in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13448/) (2022)
- [Models and Datasets for Cross-Lingual Summarisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09583/) (2022)
- [A Closer Look at Data Bias in Neural Extractive Summarization Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13705/) (2019)
- [Klexikon: A German Dataset for Joint Summarization and Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07198/) (2022)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization based on Language Model Conditioning and Locality Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13027/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Summarisation of German Judgments in conjunction with a Class-based Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05947/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With recent advancements in the area of Natural Language Processing, the focus is slowly shifting from a purely English-centric view towards more language-specific solutions, including German. Especially practical for businesses to analyze their growing amount of textual data are text summarization systems, which transform long input documents into compressed and more digestible summary texts. In this work, we assess the particular landscape of German abstractive text summarization and investigate the reasons why practically useful solutions for abstractive text summarization are still absent in industry. Our focus is two-fold, analyzing a) training resources, and b) publicly available summarization systems. We are able to show that popular existing datasets exhibit crucial flaws in their assumptions about the original sources, which frequently leads to detrimental effects on system generalization and evaluation biases. We confirm that for the most popular training dataset, MLSUM, over 50% of the training set is unsuitable for abstractive summarization purposes. Furthermore, available systems frequently fail to compare to simple baselines, and ignore more effective and efficient extractive summarization approaches. We attribute poor evaluation quality to a variety of different factors, which are investigated in more detail in this work: A lack of qualitative (and diverse) gold data considered for training, understudied (and untreated) positional biases in some of the existing datasets, and the lack of easily accessible and streamlined pre-processing strategies or analysis tools. We provide a comprehensive assessment of available models on the cleaned datasets, and find that this can lead to a reduction of more than 20 ROUGE-1 points during evaluation. The code for dataset filtering and reproducing results can be found online at https://github.com/dennlinger/summaries