Papers › Corpora Evaluation and System Bias Detection in Multi-document Summarization

Corpora Evaluation and System Bias Detection in Multi-document Summarization

5 Oct 2020Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020arXiv:2010.01786archive 2025-07-28

Alvin Dey, Tanya Chowdhury, Yash Kumar Atri, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Multi-document summarization (MDS) is the task of reflecting key points from any set of documents into a concise text paragraph. In the past, it has been used to aggregate news, tweets, product reviews, etc. from various sources. Owing to no standard definition of the task, we encounter a plethora of datasets with varying levels of overlap and conflict between participating documents. There is also no standard regarding what constitutes summary information in MDS. Adding to the challenge is the fact that new systems report results on a set of chosen datasets, which might not correlate with their performance on the other datasets. In this paper, we study this heterogeneous task with the help of a few widely used MDS corpora and a suite of state-of-the-art models. We make an attempt to quantify the quality of summarization corpus and prescribe a list of points to consider while proposing a new MDS corpus. Next, we analyze the reason behind the absence of an MDS system which achieves superior performance across all corpora. We then observe the extent to which system metrics are influenced, and bias is propagated due to corpus properties. The scripts to reproduce the experiments in this work are available at https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/summarization_bias.git.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

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

Code

LCS2-IIITD/summarization_bias 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

Bias DetectionDocument SummarizationMulti-Document 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