# M2DS: Multilingual Dataset for Multi-document Summarisation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12336 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12336/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (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)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10198/) (2018)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09305/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14235/) (2020)
- [MS2: Multi-Document Summarization of Medical Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06486/) (2021)
- [Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08858/) (2018)
- [PRIMERA: Pyramid-based Masked Sentence Pre-training for Multi-document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08499/) (2021)
- [Multi-document Summarization via Deep Learning Techniques: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04843/) (2020)
- [Generating a Structured Summary of Numerous Academic Papers: Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04580/) (2023)
- [Large Scale Multi-Lingual Multi-Modal Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06560/) (2023)
- [Do Multi-Document Summarization Models Synthesize?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13844/) (2023)
- [Multi-document Summarization: A Comparative Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04951/) (2023)
- [PeerSum: A Peer Review Dataset for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01769/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SinhalaMMLU: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multitask Language Understanding in Sinhala](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03162/) (2025)
- [MOLE: Metadata Extraction and Validation in Scientific Papers Using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19800/) (2025)
- [COSMMIC: Comment-Sensitive Multimodal Multilingual Indian Corpus for Summarization and Headline Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15372/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the rapidly evolving digital era, there is an increasing demand for concise information as individuals seek to distil key insights from various sources. Recent attention from researchers on Multi-document Summarisation (MDS) has resulted in diverse datasets covering customer reviews, academic papers, medical and legal documents, and news articles. However, the English-centric nature of these datasets has created a conspicuous void for multilingual datasets in today's globalised digital landscape, where linguistic diversity is celebrated. Media platforms such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have disseminated news in 20+ languages for decades. With only 380 million people speaking English natively as their first language, accounting for less than 5% of the global population, the vast majority primarily relies on other languages. These facts underscore the need for inclusivity in MDS research, utilising resources from diverse languages. Recognising this gap, we present the Multilingual Dataset for Multi-document Summarisation (M2DS), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first dataset of its kind. It includes document-summary pairs in five languages from BBC articles published during the 2010-2023 period. This paper introduces M2DS, emphasising its unique multilingual aspect, and includes baseline scores from state-of-the-art MDS models evaluated on our dataset.