Datasets › BookSum
BookSum
BookSum is a collection of datasets for long-form narrative summarization. This dataset covers source documents from the literature domain, such as novels, plays and stories, and includes highly abstractive, human written summaries on three levels of granularity of increasing difficulty: paragraph-, chapter-, and book-level. The domain and structure of this dataset poses a unique set of challenges for summarization systems, which include: processing very long documents, non-trivial causal and temporal dependencies, and rich discourse structures.
BookSum contains summaries for 142,753 paragraphs, 12,293 chapters and 436 books.
Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28
All 2 leaderboards whose dataset resolves to this page shown (sort by any header). "First row" is the archive's own first row at snapshot, in the archive's row order; nothing here re-ranks and metric direction is not asserted.
| First row (archive order) | Paper | Code | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long-Form Narrative Summarization | BookSum | NexusSum (Mistral Large) BERTScore (F1) 70.70 | NexusSum: Hierarchical LLM Agents for Long-Form... | — | 10 | Compare |
| Text Summarization | BookSum | Echoes-Extractive-Abstractive ROUGE 42.13 | Echoes from Alexandria: A Large Resource for... | babelscape/echoes-from-alexandria | 3 | Compare |
Papers archive 2025-07-28
6 shown of 6 papers with a leaderboard row on this dataset's benchmarks, newest first. The archive's own "papers using this dataset" list was never published, so this is the benchmark-backed subset; the archive's count for this dataset is 39. The Syntology column is from Syntology's graph (read 2026-09-24), stated per sample; it is not part of any archive number.
| Date | Samples run Syntology | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NexusSum: Hierarchical LLM Agents for Long-Form Narrative Summarization | 0 | 3 | 30 May 2025 | not harvested |
| End-to-End Long Document Summarization using Gradient Caching | 0 | 4 | 3 Jan 2025 | not harvested |
| Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Tasks | 0 | 3 | 4 Jun 2024 | not harvested |
| Echoes from Alexandria: A Large Resource for Multilingual Book Summarization | 1 | 1 | 7 Jun 2023 | not harvested |
| Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Text Models for Long Text Sequences | 1 | 1 | 21 Sep 2022 | not harvested |
| Long Document Summarization with Top-down and Bottom-up Inference | 1 | 1 | 15 Mar 2022 | not harvested |
Dataset loaders archive 2025-07-28
2 loaders as listed in the archive; links are outbound and not re-checked here.
Tasks archive 2025-07-28
License archive 2025-07-28
Modalities archive 2025-07-28
Languages archive 2025-07-28
Variants archive 2025-07-28
- BookSum
1 variant name, as the archive lists them.
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