Papers › Generating a Structured Summary of Numerous Academic Papers: Dataset and Method

Generating a Structured Summary of Numerous Academic Papers: Dataset and Method

9 Feb 2023arXiv:2302.04580archive 2025-07-28

Shuaiqi Liu, Jiannong Cao, Ruosong Yang, Zhiyuan Wen

Writing a survey paper on one research topic usually needs to cover the salient content from numerous related papers, which can be modeled as a multi-document summarization (MDS) task. Existing MDS datasets usually focus on producing the structureless summary covering a few input documents. Meanwhile, previous structured summary generation works focus on summarizing a single document into a multi-section summary. These existing datasets and methods cannot meet the requirements of summarizing numerous academic papers into a structured summary. To deal with the scarcity of available data, we propose BigSurvey, the first large-scale dataset for generating comprehensive summaries of numerous academic papers on each topic. We collect target summaries from more than seven thousand survey papers and utilize their 430 thousand reference papers' abstracts as input documents. To organize the diverse content from dozens of input documents and ensure the efficiency of processing long text sequences, we propose a summarization method named category-based alignment and sparse transformer (CAST). The experimental results show that our CAST method outperforms various advanced summarization methods.

PaperPDFCode

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

Code

stevenlau6/bigsurvey 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

Document SummarizationMulti-Document SummarizationSurvey

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutCosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxSparse TransformerWeight Decay

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