CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs
Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology (BUET)（孟加拉国工程技术大学（BUET））；University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Swinburne University of Technology（斯威本科技大学）
We present CrossSum, a large-scale cross-lingual summarization dataset comprising 1.68 million article-summary samples in 1,500+ language pairs. We create CrossSum by aligning parallel articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual abstractive summarization dataset and perform a controlled human evaluation to validate its quality. We propose a multistage data sampling algorithm to effectively train a cross-lingual summarization model capable of summarizing an article in any target language. We also introduce LaSE, an embedding-based metric for automatically evaluating model-generated summaries. LaSE is strongly correlated with ROUGE and, unlike ROUGE, can be reliably measured even in the absence of references in the target language. Performance on ROUGE and LaSE indicate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and the first ever that is not centered around English. We are releasing the dataset, training and evaluation scripts, and models to spur future research on cross-lingual summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum
Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. We introduce WikiMulti - a new dataset for cross-lingual summarization based on Wikipedia articles in 15 languages. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our dataset. We make our dataset publicly available here: https://github.com/tikhonovpavel/wikimulti
Microsoft Cognitive Services Research Group（微软认知服务研究组）
Cross-lingual Summarization (CLS) aims at producing a summary in the target language for an article in the source language. Traditional solutions employ a two-step approach, i.e. translate then summarize or summarize then translate. Recently, end-to-end models have achieved better results, but these approaches are mostly limited by their dependence on large-scale labeled data. We propose a solution based on mixed-lingual pre-training that leverages both cross-lingual tasks such as translation and monolingual tasks like masked language models. Thus, our model can leverage the massive monolingua…
We present a multi-task learning framework for cross-lingual abstractive summarization to augment training data. Recent studies constructed pseudo cross-lingual abstractive summarization data to train their neural encoder-decoders. Meanwhile, we introduce existing genuine data such as translation pairs and monolingual abstractive summarization data into training. Our proposed method, Transum, attaches a special token to the beginning of the input sentence to indicate the target task. The special token enables us to incorporate the genuine data into the training data easily. The experimental re…
Current state-of-the-art cross-lingual summarization models employ multi-task learning paradigm, which works on a shared vocabulary module and relies on the self-attention mechanism to attend among tokens in two languages. However, correlation learned by self-attention is often loose and implicit, inefficient in capturing crucial cross-lingual representations between languages. The matter worsens when performing on languages with separate morphological or structural features, making the cross-lingual alignment more challenging, resulting in the performance drop. To overcome this problem, we pr…
Cross-lingual text summarization aims at generating a document summary in one language given input in another language. It is a practically important but under-explored task, primarily due to the dearth of available data. Existing methods resort to machine translation to synthesize training data, but such pipeline approaches suffer from error propagation. In this work, we propose an end-to-end cross-lingual text summarization model. The model uses reinforcement learning to directly optimize a bilingual semantic similarity metric between the summaries generated in a target language and gold sum…
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Sichuan Lan-bridge Information Technology Co., Ltd.（四川蓝桥信息技术有限公司）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
We propose the shared task of cross-lingual conversation summarization, \emph{ConvSumX Challenge}, opening new avenues for researchers to investigate solutions that integrate conversation summarization and machine translation. This task can be particularly useful due to the emergence of online meetings and conferences. We construct a new benchmark, covering 2 real-world scenarios and 3 language directions, including a low-resource language. We hope that \emph{ConvSumX} can motivate researches to go beyond English and break the barrier for non-English speakers to benefit from recent advances of…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Southeast Academy of Information Technology（东南信息研究院）
Parallel cross-lingual summarization data is scarce, requiring models to better use the limited available cross-lingual resources. Existing methods to do so often adopt sequence-to-sequence networks with multi-task frameworks. Such approaches apply multiple decoders, each of which is utilized for a specific task. However, these independent decoders share no parameters, hence fail to capture the relationships between the discrete phrases of summaries in different languages, breaking the connections in order to transfer the knowledge of the high-resource languages to low-resource languages. To b…
Sichuan University（四川大学）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team / Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) is the task to generate a summary in one language for an article in a different language. Previous studies on CLS mainly take pipeline methods or train the end-to-end model using the translated parallel data. However, the quality of generated cross-lingual summaries needs more further efforts to improve, and the model performance has never been evaluated on the hand-written CLS dataset. Therefore, we first propose a clue-guided cross-lingual abstractive summarization method to improve the quality of cross-lingual summaries, and then construct a novel hand-writ…
Existing summarization datasets come with two main drawbacks: (1) They tend to focus on overly exposed domains, such as news articles or wiki-like texts, and (2) are primarily monolingual, with few multilingual datasets. In this work, we propose a novel dataset, called EUR-Lex-Sum, based on manually curated document summaries of legal acts from the European Union law platform (EUR-Lex). Documents and their respective summaries exist as cross-lingual paragraph-aligned data in several of the 24 official European languages, enabling access to various cross-lingual and lower-resourced summarizatio…
University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Hochschule der Medien（斯图加特传媒学院）
The number of scientific publications nowadays is rapidly increasing, causing information overload for researchers and making it hard for scholars to keep up to date with current trends and lines of work. Consequently, recent work on applying text mining technologies for scholarly publications has investigated the application of automatic text summarization technologies, including extreme summarization, for this domain. However, previous work has concentrated only on monolingual settings, primarily in English. In this paper, we fill this research gap and present an abstractive cross-lingual su…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
We introduce WikiLingua, a large-scale, multilingual dataset for the evaluation of crosslingual abstractive summarization systems. We extract article and summary pairs in 18 languages from WikiHow, a high quality, collaborative resource of how-to guides on a diverse set of topics written by human authors. We create gold-standard article-summary alignments across languages by aligning the images that are used to describe each how-to step in an article. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our datase…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is the task to produce a summary in one particular language for a source document in a different language. Existing methods simply divide this task into two steps: summarization and translation, leading to the problem of error propagation. To handle that, we present an end-to-end CLS framework, which we refer to as Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (NCLS), for the first time. Moreover, we propose to further improve NCLS by incorporating two related tasks, monolingual summarization and machine translation, into the training process of CLS under multi-task lear…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Southeast Academy of Information Technology（东南信息技术研究院）；Beijing Engineering Research Center of High Volume Language Information Processing and Cloud Computing Applications（北京海量语言信息处理与云计算应用工程研究中心）
Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) is a task that extracts important information from a source document and summarizes it into a summary in another language. It is a challenging task that requires a system to understand, summarize, and translate at the same time, making it highly related to Monolingual Summarization (MS) and Machine Translation (MT). In practice, the training resources for Machine Translation are far more than that for cross-lingual and monolingual summarization. Thus incorporating the Machine Translation corpus into CLS would be beneficial for its performance. However, the pre…
The goal of the cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is to convert a document in one language (e.g., English) to a summary in another one (e.g., Chinese). Essentially, the CLS task is the combination of machine translation (MT) and monolingual summarization (MS), and thus there exists the hierarchical relationship between MT\&MS and CLS. Existing studies on CLS mainly focus on utilizing pipeline methods or jointly training an end-to-end model through an auxiliary MT or MS objective. However, it is very challenging for the model to directly conduct CLS as it requires both the abilities to translat…
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Sichuan Lan-bridge Information Technology Co., Ltd.（四川语言桥信息技术有限公司）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）
IISER Kolkata（印度科学教育与研究学院加尔各答分院）；Indian Institute of Technology Patna（印度理工学院巴特那分校）
Significant developments in techniques such as encoder-decoder models have enabled us to represent information comprising multiple modalities. This information can further enhance many downstream tasks in the field of information retrieval and natural language processing; however, improvements in multi-modal techniques and their performance evaluation require large-scale multi-modal data which offers sufficient diversity. Multi-lingual modeling for a variety of tasks like multi-modal summarization, text generation, and translation leverages information derived from high-quality multi-lingual a…
Think Carefully and Check Again! Meta-Generation Unlocking LLMs for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Soochow University（苏州大学）；Tencent Inc（腾讯公司）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
Cross-lingual summarization is the task of generating a summary in one language (e.g., English) for the given document(s) in a different language (e.g., Chinese). Under the globalization background, this task has attracted increasing attention of the computational linguistics community. Nevertheless, there still remains a lack of comprehensive review for this task. Therefore, we present the first systematic critical review on the datasets, approaches, and challenges in this field. Specifically, we carefully organize existing datasets and approaches according to different construction methods a…
GlobeSumm: A Challenging Benchmark Towards Unifying Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual and Multi-document News Summarization
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Central South University（中南大学）；Du Xiaoman Financial（度小满金融）
Automatic text summarization extracts important information from texts and presents the information in the form of a summary. Abstractive summarization approaches progressed significantly by switching to deep neural networks, but results are not yet satisfactory, especially for languages where large training sets do not exist. In several natural language processing tasks, a cross-lingual model transfer is successfully applied in less-resource languages. For summarization, the cross-lingual model transfer was not attempted due to a non-reusable decoder side of neural models that cannot correct …
Tencent Inc（腾讯公司）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
We present ClidSum, a benchmark dataset for building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. It consists of 67k+ dialogue documents from two subsets (i.e., SAMSum and MediaSum) and 112k+ annotated summaries in different target languages. Based on the proposed ClidSum, we introduce two benchmark settings for supervised and semi-supervised scenarios, respectively. We then build various baseline systems in different paradigms (pipeline and end-to-end) and conduct extensive experiments on ClidSum to provide deeper analyses. Furthermore, we propose mDialBART which extends mBART-5…
Soochow University（苏州大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Jilin Kexun Information Technology Co., Ltd.（吉林科讯信息技术有限公司）
Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) aims at generating summaries in one language for the given documents in another language. CLS has attracted wide research attention due to its practical significance in the multi-lingual world. Though great contributions have been made, existing CLS works typically focus on short documents, such as news articles, short dialogues and guides. Different from these short texts, long documents such as academic articles and business reports usually discuss complicated subjects and consist of thousands of words, making them non-trivial to process and summarize. To pr…
Multilingual Steering by Design: Multilingual Sparse Autoencoders and Principled Layer Selection
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Darmstadt（德累斯顿技术大学）；Centre for European Research in Trusted AI (CERTAIN)（欧洲可信AI研究中心）
Relevant and timely information collected from social media during crises can be an invaluable resource for emergency management. However, extracting this information remains a challenging task, particularly when dealing with social media postings in multiple languages. This work proposes a cross-lingual method for retrieving and summarizing crisis-relevant information from social media postings. We describe a uniform way of expressing various information needs through structured queries and a way of creating summaries answering those information needs. The method is based on multilingual tran…
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We construct Global Voices, a multilingual dataset for evaluating cross-lingual summarization methods. We extract social-network descriptions of Global Voices news articles to cheaply collect evaluation data for into-English and from-English summarization in 15 languages. Especially, for the into-English summarization task, we crowd-source a high-quality evaluation dataset based on guidelines that emphasize accuracy, coverage, and understandability. To ensure the quality of this dataset, we collect human ratings to filter out bad summaries, and conduct a survey on humans, which shows that the …
China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
For multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretrained language models (multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs), e.g. mBART, the self-supervised pretraining task is trained on a wide range of monolingual languages, e.g. 25 languages from CommonCrawl, while the downstream cross-lingual tasks generally progress on a bilingual language subset, e.g. English-German, making there exists the data discrepancy, namely domain discrepancy, and cross-lingual learning objective discrepancy, namely task discrepancy, between the pretraining and finetuning stages. To bridge the above cross-lingual domain and task gaps, we exten…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；George Washington University（乔治华盛顿大学）；University of the Basque Country（巴斯克大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the meaning similarity of sentences. Applications include machine translation (MT), summarization, generation, question answering (QA), short answer grading, semantic search, dialog and conversational systems. The STS shared task is a venue for assessing the current state-of-the-art. The 2017 task focuses on multilingual and cross-lingual pairs with one sub-track exploring MT quality estimation (MTQE) data. The task obtained strong participation from 31 teams, with 17 participating in all language tracks. We summarize performance and review a selectio…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
In this paper, we explore the challenging problem of performing a generative task in a target language when labeled data is only available in English, using summarization as a case study. We assume a strict setting with no access to parallel data or machine translation and find that common transfer learning approaches struggle in this setting, as a generative multilingual model fine-tuned purely on English catastrophically forgets how to generate non-English. Given the recent rise of parameter-efficient adaptation techniques, we conduct the first investigation into how one such method, prompt …
This paper surveys several recent abstract summarization methods: T5, Pegasus, and ProphetNet. We implement the systems in two languages: English and Indonesian languages. We investigate the impact of pre-training models (one T5, three Pegasuses, three ProphetNets) on several Wikipedia datasets in English and Indonesian language and compare the results to the Wikipedia systems' summaries. The T5-Large, the Pegasus-XSum, and the ProphetNet-CNNDM provide the best summarization. The most significant factors that influence ROUGE performance are coverage, density, and compression. The higher the sc…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
In this paper, we introduce DOCmT5, a multilingual sequence-to-sequence language model pretrained with large scale parallel documents. While previous approaches have focused on leveraging sentence-level parallel data, we try to build a general-purpose pretrained model that can understand and generate long documents. We propose a simple and effective pretraining objective - Document reordering Machine Translation (DrMT), in which the input documents that are shuffled and masked need to be translated. DrMT brings consistent improvements over strong baselines on a variety of document-level genera…
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；Shizuoka University（静冈大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Despite the recent advancement in NLP research, cross-lingual transfer for natural language generation is relatively understudied. In this work, we transfer supervision from high resource language (HRL) to multiple low-resource languages (LRLs) for natural language generation (NLG). We consider four NLG tasks (text summarization, question generation, news headline generation, and distractor generation) and three syntactically diverse languages, i.e., English, Hindi, and Japanese. We propose an unsupervised cross-lingual language generation framework (called ZmBART) that does not use any parall…
We present MLSUM, the first large-scale MultiLingual SUMmarization dataset. Obtained from online newspapers, it contains 1.5M+ article/summary pairs in five different languages -- namely, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish. Together with English newspapers from the popular CNN/Daily mail dataset, the collected data form a large scale multilingual dataset which can enable new research directions for the text summarization community. We report cross-lingual comparative analyses based on state-of-the-art systems. These highlight existing biases which motivate the use of a multi-lingual dat…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；Texas A&M University（德州农工大学）
This paper demonstrates that multilingual pretraining and multilingual fine-tuning are both critical for facilitating cross-lingual transfer in zero-shot translation, where the neural machine translation (NMT) model is tested on source languages unseen during supervised training. Following this idea, we present SixT+, a strong many-to-English NMT model that supports 100 source languages but is trained with a parallel dataset in only six source languages. SixT+ initializes the decoder embedding and the full encoder with XLM-R large and then trains the encoder and decoder layers with a simple tw…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
In zero-shot multilingual extractive text summarization, a model is typically trained on English summarization dataset and then applied on summarization datasets of other languages. Given English gold summaries and documents, sentence-level labels for extractive summarization are usually generated using heuristics. However, these monolingual labels created on English datasets may not be optimal on datasets of other languages, for that there is the syntactic or semantic discrepancy between different languages. In this way, it is possible to translate the English dataset to other languages and o…
University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Educational Testing Service (ETS)（教育考试服务中心（ETS））
Breaking down the structure of long texts into semantically coherent segments makes the texts more readable and supports downstream applications like summarization and retrieval. Starting from an apparent link between text coherence and segmentation, we introduce a novel supervised model for text segmentation with simple but explicit coherence modeling. Our model -- a neural architecture consisting of two hierarchically connected Transformer networks -- is a multi-task learning model that couples the sentence-level segmentation objective with the coherence objective that differentiates correct…
