Multi-XScience: A large-scale dataset for extreme multi-document summarization of scientific articles

Abstract

Multi-document summarization is a challenging task for which there exists little large-scale datasets. We propose Multi-XScience, a large-scale multi-document summarization dataset created from scientific articles. Multi-XScience introduces a challenging multi-document summarization task: writing the related-work section of a paper based on its abstract and the articles it references. Our work is inspired by extreme summarization, a dataset construction protocol that favours abstractive modeling approaches. Descriptive statistics and empirical results-using several state-of-the-art models trained on the Multi-XScience dataset-reveal that Multi-XScience is well suited for abstractive models.