# Large Language Models for the Summarization of Czech Documents: From History to the Present

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18848 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18848/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [GQA: Training Generalized Multi-Query Transformer Models from Multi-Head Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13245/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Quantization Methods for Efficient Neural Network Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13630/) (2021)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Preference Optimization: Pushing the Boundaries of LLM Performance in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08417/) (2024)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [A Paradigm Shift in Machine Translation: Boosting Translation Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11674/) (2023)
- [Tensor2Tensor for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07416/) (2018)
- [Leveraging BERT for Extractive Text Summarization on Lectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04165/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models for Summarizing Czech Historical Documents and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10368/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text summarization is the task of automatically condensing longer texts into shorter, coherent summaries while preserving the original meaning and key information. Although this task has been extensively studied in English and other high-resource languages, Czech summarization, particularly in the context of historical documents, remains underexplored. This is largely due to the inherent linguistic complexity of Czech and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets. In this work, we address this gap by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Mistral and mT5, which have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and multilingual settings. In addition, we also propose a translation-based approach that first translates Czech texts into English, summarizes them using an English-language model, and then translates the summaries back into Czech. Our study makes the following main contributions: We demonstrate that LLMs achieve new state-of-the-art results on the SumeCzech dataset, a benchmark for modern Czech text summarization, showing the effectiveness of multilingual LLMs even for morphologically rich, medium-resource languages like Czech. We introduce a new dataset, Posel od vCerchova, designed for the summarization of historical Czech texts. This dataset is derived from digitized 19th-century publications and annotated for abstractive summarization. We provide initial baselines using modern LLMs to facilitate further research in this underrepresented area. By combining cutting-edge models with both modern and historical Czech datasets, our work lays the foundation for further progress in Czech summarization and contributes valuable resources for future research in Czech historical document processing and low-resource summarization more broadly.