# Summarization from Leaderboards to Practice: Choosing A Representation Backbone and Ensuring Robustness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (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)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02112/) (2021)
- [BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00523/) (2019)
- [Abstractive Summarization of Reddit Posts with Multi-level Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00783/) (2018)
- [AdaptSum: Towards Low-Resource Domain Adaptation for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11332/) (2021)
- [Quantitative Argument Summarization and Beyond: Cross-Domain Key Point Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05369/) (2020)
- [A Pilot Study of Domain Adaptation Effect for Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07062/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Academic literature does not give much guidance on how to build the best possible customer-facing summarization system from existing research components. Here we present analyses to inform the selection of a system backbone from popular models; we find that in both automatic and human evaluation, BART performs better than PEGASUS and T5. We also find that when applied cross-domain, summarizers exhibit considerably worse performance. At the same time, a system fine-tuned on heterogeneous domains performs well on all domains and will be most suitable for a broad-domain summarizer. Our work highlights the need for heterogeneous domain summarization benchmarks. We find considerable variation in system output that can be captured only with human evaluation and are thus unlikely to be reflected in standard leaderboards with only automatic evaluation.