ForumSum: A Multi-Speaker Conversation Summarization Dataset

Abstract

Abstractive summarization quality had large improvements since recent language pretraining techniques. However, currently there is a lack of datasets for the growing needs of conversation summarization applications. Thus we collected ForumSum, a diverse and high-quality conversation summarization dataset with human written summaries. The conversations in ForumSum dataset are collected from a wide variety of internet forums. To make the dataset easily expandable, we also release the process of dataset creation. Our experiments show that models trained on ForumSum have better zero-shot and few-shot transferability to other datasets than the existing large chat summarization dataset SAMSum. We also show that using a conversational corpus for pre-training improves the quality of the chat summarization model.