# Evaluating Small Language Models for News Summarization: Implications and Factors Influencing Performance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00641 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00641/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11520/) (2021)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [News Summarization and Evaluation in the Era of GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12356/) (2022)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Human-like Summarization Evaluation with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02554/) (2023)
- [Small Language Models: Survey, Measurements, and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15790/) (2024)
- [What Language Model to Train if You Have One Million GPU Hours?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15424/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09184/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Guiding Reasoning in Small Language Models with LLM Assistance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09923/) (2025)
- [SemCSE: Semantic Contrastive Sentence Embeddings Using LLM-Generated Summaries For Scientific Abstracts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13105/) (2025)
- [From Large AI Models to Agentic AI: A Tutorial on Future Intelligent Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22311/) (2025)
- [When Bigger Isn't Better: A Comprehensive Fairness Evaluation of Political Bias in Multi-News Summarisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21309/) (2026)
- [ReacTOD: Bounded Neuro-Symbolic Agentic NLU for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19077/) (2026)
- [A Large-Scale Multi-Dimensional Empirical Study of LLMs for Conversation Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15974/) (2026)
- [Fine-Tuning Code Language Models to Detect Cross-Language Bugs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21954/) (2025)
- [Dual-stage and Lightweight Patient Chart Summarization for Emergency Physicians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06263/) (2025)
- [Can Small Language Models Handle Context-Summarized Multi-Turn Customer-Service QA? A Synthetic Data-Driven Comparative Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00665/) (2026)
- [Task-Centric Acceleration of Small-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24174/) (2026)
- [LLMs Should Incorporate Explicit Mechanisms for Human Empathy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10557/) (2026)
- [No Reader Left Behind: Multi-Agent Summaries Everyone Can Understand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28836/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing demand for efficient summarization tools in resource-constrained environments highlights the need for effective solutions. While large language models (LLMs) deliver superior summarization quality, their high computational resource requirements limit practical use applications. In contrast, small language models (SLMs) present a more accessible alternative, capable of real-time summarization on edge devices. However, their summarization capabilities and comparative performance against LLMs remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by presenting a comprehensive evaluation of 19 SLMs for news summarization across 2,000 news samples, focusing on relevance, coherence, factual consistency, and summary length. Our findings reveal significant variations in SLM performance, with top-performing models such as Phi3-Mini and Llama3.2-3B-Ins achieving results comparable to those of 70B LLMs while generating more concise summaries. Notably, SLMs are better suited for simple prompts, as overly complex prompts may lead to a decline in summary quality. Additionally, our analysis indicates that instruction tuning does not consistently enhance the news summarization capabilities of SLMs. This research not only contributes to the understanding of SLMs but also provides practical insights for researchers seeking efficient summarization solutions that balance performance and resource use.