Abstract: Automatic generation of summaries from multiple news articles is a valuable tool as the number of online publications grows rapidly. Single document summarization (SDS) systems have benefited from advances in neural encoder-decoder model thanks to the availability of large datasets. However, multi-document summarization (MDS) of news articles has been limited to datasets of a couple of hundred examples. In this paper, we introduce Multi-News, the first large-scale MDS news dataset. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end model which incorporates a traditional extractive summarization model with a standard SDS model and achieves competitive results on MDS datasets. We benchmark several methods on Multi-News and release our data and code in hope that this work will promote advances in summarization in the multi-document setting.

Introduction: Summarization is a central problem in Natural Language Processing with increasing applications as the desire to receive content in a concise and easily-understood format increases. Recent advances in neural methods for text summarization have largely been applied in the setting of single-document news summarization and headline generation BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 . These works take advantage of large datasets such as the Gigaword Corpus BIBREF3 , the CNN/Daily Mail (CNNDM) dataset BIBREF4 , the New York Times dataset BIBREF5 and the Newsroom corpus BIBREF6 , which contain on the order of hundreds of thousands to millions of article-summary pairs. However, multi-document summarization (MDS), which aims to output summaries from document clusters on the same topic, has largely been performed on datasets with less than 100 document clusters such as the DUC 2004 BIBREF7 and TAC 2011 BIBREF8 datasets, and has benefited less from advances in deep learning methods. Multi-document summarization of news events offers the challenge of outputting a well-organized summary which covers an event comprehensively while simultaneously avoiding redundancy. The input documents may differ in focus and point of view for an event. We present an example of multiple input news documents and their summary in Figure TABREF2 . The three source documents discuss the same event and contain overlaps in content: the fact that Meng Wanzhou was arrested is stated explicitly in Source 1 and 3 and indirectly in Source 2. However, some sources contain information not mentioned in the others which should be included in the summary: Source 3 states that (Wanzhou) is being sought for extradition by the US while only Source 2 mentioned the attitude of the Chinese side. Recent work in tackling this problem with neural models has attempted to exploit the graph structure among discourse relations in text clusters BIBREF9 or through an auxiliary text classification task BIBREF10 . Additionally, a couple of recent papers have attempted to adapt neural encoder decoder models trained on single document summarization datasets to MDS BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 . However, data sparsity has largely been the bottleneck of the development of neural MDS systems. The creation of large-scale multi-document summarization dataset for training has been restricted due to the sparsity and cost of human-written summaries. liu18wikisum trains abstractive sequence-to-sequence models on a large corpus of Wikipedia text with citations and search engine results as input documents. However, no analogous dataset exists in the news domain. To bridge the gap, we introduce Multi-News, the first large-scale MDS news dataset, which contains 56,216 articles-summary pairs. We also propose a hierarchical model for neural abstractive multi-document summarization, which consists of a pointer-generator network BIBREF1 and an additional Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) BIBREF14 module that calculates sentence ranking scores based on relevancy and redundancy. We integrate sentence-level MMR scores into the pointer-generator model to adapt the attention weights on a word-level. Our model performs competitively on both our Multi-News dataset and the DUC 2004 dataset on ROUGE scores. We additionally perform human evaluation on several system outputs. Our contributions are as follows: We introduce the first large-scale multi-document summarization datasets in the news domain. We propose an end-to-end method to incorporate MMR into pointer-generator networks. Finally, we benchmark various methods on our dataset to lay the foundations for future work on large-scale MDS.

Question: What sources do the news come from?
Answer: 1500 news sites