# μPLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14205 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14205/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04558/) (2016)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03872/) (2017)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Translation with Extensible Multilingual Pretraining and Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00401/) (2020)
- [WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03093/) (2020)
- [A Survey Of Cross-lingual Word Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04902/) (2017)
- [Hallucinated but Factual! Inspecting the Factuality of Hallucinations in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09784/) (2021)
- [MLSUM: The Multilingual Summarization Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14900/) (2020)
- [Data-to-Text Generation with Content Selection and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00582/) (2018)
- [Step-by-Step: Separating Planning from Realization in Neural Data-to-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03396/) (2019)
- [Planning with Learned Entity Prompts for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07606/) (2021)
- [ReFinED: An Efficient Zero-shot-capable Approach to End-to-End Entity Linking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04108/) (2022)
- [NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00156/) (2019)
- [Cross-Lingual Natural Language Generation via Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10481/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Multilingual Large Language Model: A Survey of Resources, Taxonomy and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04925/) (2024)
- [Low-Rank Adaptation for Multilingual Summarization: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08572/) (2023)
- [What Is That Talk About? A Video-to-Text Summarization Dataset for Scientific Presentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08279/) (2025)
- [Analysis of Plan-based Retrieval for Grounded Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10490/) (2024)
- [Explanatory Summarization with Discourse-Driven Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19339/) (2025)
- [Multi-Target Cross-Lingual Summarization: a novel task and a language-neutral approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00502/) (2024)
- [Understanding LLM Behavior in Multi-Target Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01252/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual summarization consists of generating a summary in one language given an input document in a different language, allowing for the dissemination of relevant content across speakers of other languages. The task is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingual datasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing and translating. This work presents μPLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing the summary's content and the order in which it should be communicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: using a multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonical designation across languages and generate the summary conditioned on this cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, μPLAN models improve the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairs compared to baselines without a planning component.