Papers with MDS
Multi Document Summarization Evaluation in the Presence of Damaging Content (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics evaluate a summary based on relevance and consistency with the source documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the ability of MDS systems to handle damaging documents in their input set by lexical similarity and language model likelihood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics show that they can summarize a set of documents without damaging content. |
An Empirical Study on Topic Preservation in Multi-Document Summarization (2022.aacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization is a process of generating an informative and concise summary from multiple topic-related documents. |
| Approach: | They perform empirical analysis on two MDS datasets and study topic preservation on generated summaries from 8 MDS models. |
| Outcome: | The results show that extractive and abstractive summarization methods preserve topic information from source documents. |
Multi-Document Summarization with Centroid-Based Pretraining (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | In Multi-Document Summarization, the input is a set of documents, and the output is its summary. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel pretraining objective that uses the ROUGE-based centroid of each document cluster as a proxy for its summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is better or comparable to state-of-the-art models. |
A Spectral Method for Unsupervised Multi-Document Summarization (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a spectral-based hypothesis is proposed for the unsupervised task of multi-document summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a spectral-based hypothesis that a summary candidate's spectral impact is closely linked to its spectre. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has a competitive result compared to state-of-the-art systems. |
Scaling Multi-Document Event Summarization: Evaluating Compression vs. Full-Text Approaches (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Summarizing large text collections is a valuable tool for document research . a multi-stage pipeline and lack of global context are challenges for large-scale summarization systems. |
| Approach: | They compare compression and full-text systems for large-scale multi-document summarization . they find that compression-based methods outperform full-context methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform compression-based methods on three datasets . however, they suffer information loss due to their multi-stage pipeline and lack of global context. |
Learning Low-Resource End-To-End Goal-Oriented Dialog for Fast and Reliable System Deployment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing end-to-end dialog systems perform less effectively when data is scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Dialog System which combines meta-learning and human-machine collaboration to improve dialog learning by a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms non-meta-learning baselines on a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset for low-resource goal-oriented dialog learning. |
Improving Fairness of Large Language Models in Multi-document Summarization (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on summary-level fairness, while corpus-level focuses on corpus of summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference tuning method that focuses on both summary-level and corpus-level fairness in MDS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines while maintaining critical qualities of summaries. |
Multi-News: A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization (MDS) of news articles has been limited to datasets of a couple of hundred examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which integrates a traditional extractive summarization model with a standard SDS model and achieves competitive results on MDS datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on large-scale datasets. |
Improving Multi-Document Summarization through Referenced Flexible Extraction with Credit-Awareness (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Multi-document summarization are limited due to the extremely long input length. |
| Approach: | They propose an extract-then-abstract Transformer framework to overcome the problem . they leverage pre-trained language models to construct hierarchical extractors and abstractors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models with comparable model sizes and achieves the best results on the Multi-News, Multi-XScience, and WikiCatSum corpora. |
A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multidocument summarization (MDS) aims to compress large document collections into short summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multidocument summarization dataset that is large both in total number of document clusters and in the size of individual clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is large both in the total number of document clusters and in the size of individual clusters. |
Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization with Cross-Document Graph-based Information Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) and summarization (summarization) are closely related, but both aims to abstract the most salient information into a generated text summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to use structured IE graphs to enhance the abstractive summarization task by using cross-document IE output to incorporate an alignment loss between IE nodes and their text spans to reduce inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate summaries that are more factual while not losing abstractiveness. |
Topic-Guided Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multi-document summarization (MDS) focus on extractive and abstractive approaches to create a fluent and concise summary for a collection of thematically related documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel abstractive MDS model that represents multiple documents as a heterogeneous graph and then applies a graph-to-sequence framework to generate summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on Rouge scores and human evaluation, while learning high-quality topics. |
Proposition-Level Clustering for Multi-Document Summarization (2022.naacl-main)
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Ori Ernst, Avi Caciularu, Ori Shapira, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Mohit Bansal, Jacob Goldberger, Ido Dagan
| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on clustering sentences to indicate information saliency and avoid redundancy. |
| Approach: | They propose to group together sub-sentential propositions to generate a representative sentence for each cluster via text fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over the previous state-of-the-art method in the DUC 2004 and TAC 2011 datasets, both in automatic ROUGE scores and human preference. |
Data Selection for Multi-turn Dialogue Instruction Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned language models often use noisy multi-turn dialogue datasets with topic drift, repetitive chitchat, and mismatched answer formats across turns. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-level framework that scores whole conversations rather than isolated turns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong single-turn selectors, dialogue-level LLM scorers and heuristic baselines on three multi-turn benchmarks and an in-domain Banking test set. |
Promoting Topic Coherence and Inter-Document Consorts in Multi-Document Summarization via Simplicial Complex and Sheaf Graph (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that generate summaries from multiple sources often lack accuracy and accuracy due to the length of tokens used in encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel encoder-decoder model that uses pre-trained BART to analyze linguistic nuances, simplicial complex layer to apprehend inherent properties that transcend pairwise associations and sheaf graph attention to effectively capture heterophilic properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves consistent performance improvement across all evaluation metrics (syntactical, semantical and faithfulness). |
Multi-document Summarization with Maximal Marginal Relevance-guided Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on single-document summarization (SDS) benefit from advances in neural sequence learning, but they produce unsatisfactory results on multi-document summary (MDS). |
| Approach: | They propose a neural sequence learning method that unifies advanced neural SDS methods and statistical measures used in classical MDS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark MDS datasets. |
Corpora Evaluation and System Bias Detection in Multi-document Summarization (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a task of combining multiple documents into a concise text paragraph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-document summarization task to reflect key points from any set of documents into a concise text paragraph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better on a set of selected datasets than on the other ones. |
From Single to Multi: How LLMs Hallucinate in Multi-Document Summarization (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study investigated hallucinations in multi-document summarization tasks . but, it is unclear how challenges arising from handling multiple documents affect outputs . |
| Approach: | They investigate how hallucinations manifest in large language models when summarizing topic-specific information from a set of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models generate more hallucinations than baselines . the results highlight the need for more effective approaches to mitigate hallucinosity in MDS . |
AgreeSum: Agreement-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on agreement-oriented multidocument summarization have focused on clusters of articles . a recent study focused on the use of a pretraining framework to summarize articles based on the "union" of the articles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use agreement-oriented multidocument summarization to provide agreement-orientated summaries that represent information common to all articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called agreement-oriented multidocument summarization . the authors apply the pretrained model PEGASUS onto the task . |
Which Information Matters? Dissecting Human-written Multi-document Summaries with Partial Information Decomposition (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to characterize human-written summaries do not account for the nature of high-quality summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize human-written summaries using partial information decomposition . they propose to decompose mutual information provided by all source documents into union, redundancy, synergy, and unique information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decomposes the mutual information provided by all source documents into union, redundancy, synergy, and unique information. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
The patient is more dead than alive: exploring the current state of the multi-document summarisation of the biomedical literature (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation approaches to multi-document summarization of biomedical literature lack consistency and transparency. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic approach to human evaluation of biomedical summaries and apply it to analyze the summary generated by two current evaluation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is based on two state-of-the-art models and examines the summaries generated by the two models to understand the deficiencies of existing evaluation approaches. |
A Multi-Document Coverage Reward for RELAXed Multi-Document Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization models are limited by limited references and with maximum-likelihood objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune an MDS baseline with a reward that balances a reference-based metric such as ROUGE with coverage of the input documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the Multi-News and WCEP datasets with a low-variance estimator . the proposed model also improves the coverage of the input documents . |
Efficiently Summarizing Text and Graph Encodings of Multi-Document Clusters (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS) is a task that has seen advances with the introduction of large-scale datasets and powerful Transformer-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient graph-enhanced approach to multi-document summarization with an encoder-decoder Transformer model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to large input documents and improves on a multi-document dataset. |
How “Multi” is Multi-Document Summarization? (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization (MDS) aims at combining information spread across multiple documents . a single document often covers the full summary content . |
| Approach: | They propose a measure to evaluate the degree to which a summary is "disperse" they propose to combine information from multiple documents into a single document to generate a concise summary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure evaluates the degree to which a summary is "disperse" the measure is applied to several popular MDS datasets and state-of-the-art systems. |
The Power of Summary-Source Alignments (2024.findings-acl)
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Ori Ernst, Ori Shapira, Aviv Slobodkin, Sharon Adar, Mohit Bansal, Jacob Goldberger, Ran Levy, Ido Dagan
| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a challenging task, often decomposed to subtasks of salience and redundancy detection, followed by text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the summary-source alignment framework by applying it at the more fine-grained proposition span level and annotating alignment manually in a multi-document setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can yield several datasets for at least six different tasks. |
A Hierarchical Encoding-Decoding Scheme for Abstractive Multi-document Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been used for abstractive single-document summarization (SDS) but they may not be suitable for multi-document summary (MDS) |
| Approach: | They propose to enforce hierarchy on both encoder and decoder to facilitate multi-document interactions for MDS. |
| Outcome: | Xiao et al. (2019) outperforms or is competitive with the previous best models. |
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework that extracts the medical entities and doctor's dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets. |
PELMS: Pre-training for Effective Low-Shot Multi-Document Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for abstractive multi-document summarization fail to generate concise, reflective summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained abstractive multi-document summarization model that uses unlabeled multi-doctoral inputs to generate concise, reflective summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models on a wide range of MDS datasets. |
Coverage-based Fairness in Multi-document Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies quantify summary-level fairness using Proportional Representation, but they ignore corpus-level unfairness. |
| Approach: | They propose a new summary-level fairness measure that considers redundancy in documents . they evaluate the fairness of thirteen different multi-document summarization systems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure is based on coverage of documents with different social attribute values and considers redundancy within documents. |
Auto-hMDS: Automatic Construction of a Large Heterogeneous Multilingual Multi-Document Summarization Corpus (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for automatic text summarization are small and focused on newswires. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically generate a large multilingual multi-document summarization corpus using Wikipedia articles as summaries and to automatically search for appropriate source documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains 7,316 topics in English and German with different summary lengths and number of source documents. |
Open Domain Multi-document Summarization: A Comprehensive Study of Model Brittleness under Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-document summarization (MDS) assumes a set of topic-related documents is provided as input. |
| Approach: | They formalize the task and bootstrap it using existing datasets, retrievers and summarizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the sensitivity of summarizers to imperfect retrieval, but is highly sensitive to other errors. |
Automated Metrics for Medical Multi-Document Summarization Disagree with Human Evaluations (2023.acl-long)
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Lucy Lu Wang, Yulia Otmakhova, Jay DeYoung, Thinh Hung Truong, Bailey Kuehl, Erin Bransom, Byron Wallace
| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that models may exploit shortcuts that are difficult to detect using standard n-gram similarity metrics such as ROUGE. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-assessed summary quality facets and pairwise preferences to improve MDS evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the quality of literature review summarization models . they use human-assessed summary quality facets and pairwise preferences . |
UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) uses the extract-then-abstract paradigm, which extracts a relatively short meta-document and then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to calculate document and keyword’s perplexity to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. |
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models. |
Beyond Cross-Modal Alignment: Measuring and Leveraging Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that vision-language models have modality gaps that persist even in well-aligned models. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-dominance score to measure and leverage modality gaps . they propose automatic interpretability metrics to evaluate these features in a scalable manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for training-free probing and editing methods for understanding model perception across genders and generating adversarial examples. |
Topic-Guided Reinforcement Learning with LLMs for Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in single-document summarization, but their performance on MDS still leaves room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-guided reinforcement learning approach to improve content selection in MDS . explicit prompting models with topic labels enhances the informativeness, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multi-News and multi-XScience datasets. |
LAQuer: Localized Attribution Queries in Content-grounded Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing attribution methods associate entire sentences with source documents, which can be overwhelming for users seeking to fact-check specific claims. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that localizes selected spans of generated output to their corresponding source spans, allowing fine-grained and user-directed attribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task localizes selected spans of generated output to their corresponding source spans, allowing fine-grained and user-directed attribution. |
MDSEval: A Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yinhong Liu, Jianfeng He, Hang Su, Ruixue Lian, Yi Nian, Jake W. Vincent, Srikanth Vishnubhotla, Robinson Piramuthu, Saab Mansour
| Challenge: | Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (MDS) is a critical task with wide-ranging applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark for multimodal dialogue summarization based on image-sharing dialogues, corresponding summaries and human judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first to identify and formalize key evaluation dimensions specific to MDS. |
MDS: A Fine-Grained Dataset for Multi-Modal Dialogue Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Summarizing the dialogue into a short message has drawn much attention due to the explosion of various dialogue scenes. |
| Approach: | They develop a multi-modal dialogue summarization dataset to enhance the variety of data available for this research area. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a demanding testbed for multi-modal dialogue summarization. |
Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) struggle to identify relevant medical knowledge and generate accurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical dialogue system that integrates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment to improve medical knowledge and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy. |