Papers › CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs

CrossSum: Beyond English-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs

16 Dec 2021arXiv:2112.08804archive 2025-07-28

Abhik Bhattacharjee, Tahmid Hasan, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Yuan-Fang Li, Yong-Bin Kang, Rifat Shahriyar

We present CrossSum, a large-scale cross-lingual summarization dataset comprising 1.68 million article-summary samples in 1,500+ language pairs. We create CrossSum by aligning parallel articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual abstractive summarization dataset and perform a controlled human evaluation to validate its quality. We propose a multistage data sampling algorithm to effectively train a cross-lingual summarization model capable of summarizing an article in any target language. We also introduce LaSE, an embedding-based metric for automatically evaluating model-generated summaries. LaSE is strongly correlated with ROUGE and, unlike ROUGE, can be reliably measured even in the absence of references in the target language. Performance on ROUGE and LaSE indicate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and the first ever that is not centered around English. We are releasing the dataset, training and evaluation scripts, and models to spur future research on cross-lingual summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum

PaperPDFCode

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

Code

csebuetnlp/crosssum officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubjax 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

Abstractive Text SummarizationArticlesCross-Lingual Abstractive SummarizationRetrievalText Summarization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdafactorAttentionAttention DropoutBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGated Linear UnitInverse Square Root ScheduleLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSoftmaxT5mT5

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