Papers › HowSumm: A Multi-Document Summarization Dataset Derived from WikiHow Articles
HowSumm: A Multi-Document Summarization Dataset Derived from WikiHow Articles
Odellia Boni, Guy Feigenblat, Guy Lev, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer, Benjamin Sznajder, David Konopnicki
We present HowSumm, a novel large-scale dataset for the task of query-focused multi-document summarization (qMDS), which targets the use-case of generating actionable instructions from a set of sources. This use-case is different from the use-cases covered in existing multi-document summarization (MDS) datasets and is applicable to educational and industrial scenarios. We employed automatic methods, and leveraged statistics from existing human-crafted qMDS datasets, to create HowSumm from wikiHow website articles and the sources they cite. We describe the creation of the dataset and discuss the unique features that distinguish it from other summarization corpora. Automatic and human evaluations of both extractive and abstractive summarization models on the dataset reveal that there is room for improvement.
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Code
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | LexRank (query: method + article + steps titles) | ROUGE-1 | 53.5 | #1 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | CES (query: method + article + steps titles) | ROUGE-1 | 52.2 | #2 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | GreedyRel (query: method + article + steps titles) | ROUGE-1 | 48.6 | #3 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | CES (query: method title) | ROUGE-1 | 48.4 | #4 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | CES (query: method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 48.3 | #5 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | LexRank (query: method title) | ROUGE-1 | 47.7 | #6 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | LexRank (query: method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 47.1 | #7 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | GreedyRel (query: method title) | ROUGE-1 | 43.4 | #8 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Method | GreedyRel (query: method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 42.3 | #9 of 9 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | LexRank (query: step title) | ROUGE-1 | 39.6 | #1 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | CES (query: step title) | ROUGE-1 | 39.3 | #2 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | CES (query: step + method titles) | ROUGE-1 | 38.3 | #3 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | LexRank (query: step + method titles) | ROUGE-1 | 38.2 | #4 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | CES (query: step + method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 37.0 | #5 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | LexRank (query: step + method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 36.3 | #6 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | GreedyRel (query: step + method titles) | ROUGE-1 | 30.3 | #7 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | GreedyRel (query: step title) | ROUGE-1 | 30.1 | #8 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | BM25-HierSumm (query: step + method titles) | ROUGE-1 | 23.0 | #9 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | BM25-HierSumm (query: step title) | ROUGE-1 | 22.3 | #10 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Document Summarization | HowSumm-Step | BM25-HierSumm (query: step + method + article titles) | ROUGE-1 | 21.9 | #11 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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