Papers › Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization with Limited Parallel Resources

Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization with Limited Parallel Resources

28 May 2021ACL 2021 5arXiv:2105.13648archive 2025-07-28

Yu Bai, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang

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 bridge these connections, we propose a novel Multi-Task framework for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization (MCLAS) in a low-resource setting. Employing one unified decoder to generate the sequential concatenation of monolingual and cross-lingual summaries, MCLAS makes the monolingual summarization task a prerequisite of the cross-lingual summarization (CLS) task. In this way, the shared decoder learns interactions involving alignments and summary patterns across languages, which encourages attaining knowledge transfer. Experiments on two CLS datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms three baseline models in both low-resource and full-dataset scenarios. Moreover, in-depth analysis on the generated summaries and attention heads verifies that interactions are learned well using MCLAS, which benefits the CLS task under limited parallel resources.

PaperPDFConference PDFCodeCode Syntology ran

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

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2105.13648")

Code

Syntology Ran 6 of 11 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 5 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 5 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 11 samples from 1 repository, 6 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

WoodenWhite/MCLAS officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch 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

11 samples harvested; 6 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 5 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · our draft was wrong
5ran
5unverified

Licence: 0 of the 11 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from WoodenWhite/MCLAS. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

BertConfig WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 3b1c36eea2104045 · report
MultiHeadedAttention WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · e5315ec1cdee2571 · report
PositionalEncoding WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 992f689d275bf65e · report
PositionwiseFeedForward WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 053f83a8a313ebf7 · report
TransformerDecoderState WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 829643e0e5611d6b · report
get_generator WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · f274f2d7a3671ced · report
AbsSummarizer WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3c3311928fee0536 · report
Bert WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · e5acf3b1e86cfa1e · report
DecoderState WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 1cee6dcccabae1ab · report
TransformerDecoder WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 8de52ac26dedbb9f · report
TransformerDecoderLayer WoodenWhite/MCLAS/src/models/model_builder.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · d51520322f499873 · report

Tasks

Abstractive Text SummarizationCross-Lingual Abstractive SummarizationDecoderTransfer Learning

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