# EventSum: A Large-Scale Event-Centric Summarization Dataset for Chinese Multi-News Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09525/) (2021)
- [A Deep Reinforced Model for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04304/) (2017)
- [Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10198/) (2018)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03754/) (2020)
- [Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00079/) (2024)
- [Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14235/) (2020)
- [A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10070/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09184/) (2023)
- [MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07342/) (2022)
- [Multi-document Summarization via Deep Learning Techniques: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04843/) (2020)
- [GameWikiSum: a Novel Large Multi-Document Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06851/) (2020)
- [Extractive Multi-document Summarization Using Multilayer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02608/) (2017)
- [Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08005/) (2020)
- [PLSUM: Generating PT-BR Wikipedia by Summarizing Multiple Websites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01591/) (2021)
- [Surveying the Landscape of Text Summarization with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09411/) (2023)

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

- [R3Mem: Bridging Memory Retention and Retrieval via Reversible Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15957/) (2025)
- [EquiSumm : A Gender Bias-Aware Framework for Inclusive Tweet Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23412/) (2026)
- [CMNIE: An Information Extraction Benchmark for Chinese Military News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10722/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In real life, many dynamic events, such as major disasters and large-scale sports events, evolve continuously over time. Obtaining an overview of these events can help people quickly understand the situation and respond more effectively. This is challenging because the key information of the event is often scattered across multiple documents, involving complex event knowledge understanding and reasoning, which is under-explored in previous work. Therefore, we proposed the Event-Centric Multi-Document Summarization (ECS) task, which aims to generate concise and comprehensive summaries of a given event based on multiple related news documents. Based on this, we constructed the EventSum dataset, which was constructed using Baidu Baike entries and underwent extensive human annotation, to facilitate relevant research. It is the first large scale Chinese multi-document summarization dataset, containing 5,100 events and a total of 57,984 news documents, with an average of 11.4 input news documents and 13,471 characters per event. To ensure data quality and mitigate potential data leakage, we adopted a multi-stage annotation approach for manually labeling the test set. Given the complexity of event-related information, existing metrics struggle to comprehensively assess the quality of generated summaries. We designed specific metrics including Event Recall, Argument Recall, Causal Recall, and Temporal Recall along with corresponding calculation methods for evaluation. We conducted comprehensive experiments on EventSum to evaluate the performance of advanced long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) on this task. Our experimental results indicate that: 1) The event-centric multi-document summarization task remains challenging for existing long-context LLMs; 2) The recall metrics we designed are crucial for evaluating the comprehensiveness of the summary information.