Papers › CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems

CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems

11 Oct 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020arXiv:2010.05139archive 2025-07-28

Yiran Chen, PengFei Liu, Ming Zhong, Zi-Yi Dou, Danqing Wang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang

Neural network-based models augmented with unsupervised pre-trained knowledge have achieved impressive performance on text summarization. However, most existing evaluation methods are limited to an in-domain setting, where summarizers are trained and evaluated on the same dataset. We argue that this approach can narrow our understanding of the generalization ability for different summarization systems. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of characteristics of different datasets and investigate the performance of different summarization models under a cross-dataset setting, in which a summarizer trained on one corpus will be evaluated on a range of out-of-domain corpora. A comprehensive study of 11 representative summarization systems on 5 datasets from different domains reveals the effect of model architectures and generation ways (i.e. abstractive and extractive) on model generalization ability. Further, experimental results shed light on the limitations of existing summarizers. Brief introduction and supplementary code can be found in https://github.com/zide05/CDEvalSumm.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

atulkum/pointer_summarizer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
zide05/CDEvalSumm officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Text Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections