# Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization through Few-Shot Learning with Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04630 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04630/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a General-Purpose Natural Language Processing Task Solver?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06476/) (2023)
- [WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03093/) (2020)
- [NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00156/) (2019)
- [CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08804/) (2021)
- [Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization with Limited Parallel Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13648/) (2021)
- [SumTra: A Differentiable Pipeline for Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13240/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Legal Summarization: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17830/) (2025)
- [Think Carefully and Check Again! Meta-Generation Unlocking LLMs for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20021/) (2024)
- [Fair Representation in Parliamentary Summaries: Measuring and Mitigating Inclusion Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14221/) (2025)
- [LLMs Should Incorporate Explicit Mechanisms for Human Empathy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10557/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-lingual summarization (XLS) aims to generate a summary in a target language different from the source language document. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising zero-shot XLS performance, their few-shot capabilities on this task remain unexplored, especially for low-resource languages with limited parallel data. In this paper, we investigate the few-shot XLS performance of various models, including Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our experiments demonstrate that few-shot learning significantly improves the XLS performance of LLMs, particularly GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, in low-resource settings. However, the open-source model Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 struggles to adapt effectively to the XLS task with limited examples. Our findings highlight the potential of few-shot learning for improving XLS performance and the need for further research in designing LLM architectures and pre-training objectives tailored for this task. We provide a future work direction to explore more effective few-shot learning strategies and to investigate the transfer learning capabilities of LLMs for cross-lingual summarization.