Embrace Divergence for Richer Insights: A Multi-document Summarization Benchmark and a Case Study on Summarizing Diverse Information from News Articles
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Philippe Laban, Alexander Fabbri, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu
Abstract
Previous research in multi-document news summarization has typically concentrated on collating information that all sources agree upon. However, the summarization of diverse information dispersed across multiple articles about an event remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a new task of summarizing diverse information encountered in multiple news articles encompassing the same event. To facilitate this task, we outlined a data collection schema for identifying diverse information and curated a dataset named DiverseSumm. The dataset includes 245 news stories, with each story comprising 10 news articles and paired with a human-validated reference. Next, to enable consistent automatic evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive analysis to pinpoint the position and verbosity biases when utilizing Large Language Model (LLM)-based metrics for evaluating the coverage and faithfulness of summaries. Through correlation analyses, we outline the best practices for effectively using automatic LLM-based metrics on the DiverseSumm dataset. Finally, we study how LLMs summarize multiple news articles by analyzing which type of diverse information LLMs are capable of identifying. Our analyses suggest that despite the extraordinary capabilities of LLMs in single-document summarization, the proposed task remains a complex challenge for them mainly due to their limited coverage, with GPT-4 only able to cover under 40% of the diverse information on average.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{huang-etal-2024-embrace,
title = "Embrace Divergence for Richer Insights: A Multi-document Summarization Benchmark and a Case Study on Summarizing Diverse Information from News Articles",
author = "Huang, Kung-Hsiang and
Laban, Philippe and
Fabbri, Alexander and
Choubey, Prafulla Kumar and
Joty, Shafiq and
Xiong, Caiming and
Wu, Chien-Sheng",
editor = "Duh, Kevin and
Gomez, Helena and
Bethard, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jun,
year = "2024",
address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.32/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.32",
pages = "570--593"
}