To adapt text summarization to the multilingual world, previous work proposes multi-lingual summarization (MLS) and cross-lingual summarization (CLS). However, these two tasks have been studied separately due to the different definitions, which limits the compatible and systematic research on both of them. In this paper, we aim to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e., many-to-many summarization (M2MS), where a single model could process documents in any language and generate their summaries also in any language. As the first step towards M2MS, we conduct preliminary studies to show that M2MS can better transfer task knowledge across different languages than MLS and CLS. Furthermore, we propose Pisces, a pre-trained M2MS model that learns language modeling, cross-lingual ability and summarization ability via three-stage pre-training. Experimental results indicate that our Pisces significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, especially in the zero-shot directions, where there is no training data from the source-language documents to the target-language summaries.

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model’s capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model’s performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs’ performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA’s efficacy.

Reference Expression Generation (REG) and Comprehension (REC) are two highly correlated tasks. Modeling REG and REC simultaneously for utilizing the relation between them is a promising way to improve both. However, the problem of distinct inputs, as well as building connections between them in a single model, brings challenges to the design and training of the joint model. To address the problems, we propose a unified model for REG and REC, named UniRef. It unifies these two tasks with the carefully-designed Image-Region-Text Fusion layer (IRTF), which fuses the image, region and text via the image cross-attention and region cross-attention. Additionally, IRTF could generate pseudo input regions for the REC task to enable a uniform way for sharing the identical representation space across the REC and REG. We further propose Vision-conditioned Masked Language Modeling (VMLM) and Text-Conditioned Region Prediction (TRP) to pre-train UniRef model on multi-granular corpora. The VMLM and TRP are directly related to REG and REC, respectively, but could help each other. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both REG and REC.

We present ClidSum, a benchmark dataset towards building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. It consists of 67k+ dialogue documents and 112k+ annotated summaries in different target languages. Based on the proposed ClidSum, we introduce two benchmark settings for supervised and semi-supervised scenarios, respectively. We then build various baseline systems in different paradigms (pipeline and end-to-end) and conduct extensive experiments on ClidSum to provide deeper analyses. Furthermore, we propose mDialBART which extends mBART via further pre-training, where the multiple objectives help the pre-trained model capture the structural characteristics as well as key content in dialogues and the transformation from source to the target language. Experimental results show the superiority of mDialBART, as an end-to-end model, outperforms strong pipeline models on ClidSum. Finally, we discuss specific challenges that current approaches faced with this task and give multiple promising directions for future research. We have released the dataset and code at https://github.com/krystalan/ClidSum.

Cross-lingual summarization is the task of generating a summary in one language (e.g., English) for the given document(s) in a different language (e.g., Chinese). Under the globalization background, this task has attracted increasing attention of the computational linguistics community. Nevertheless, there still remains a lack of comprehensive review for this task. Therefore, we present the first systematic critical review on the datasets, approaches, and challenges in this field. Specifically, we carefully organize existing datasets and approaches according to different construction methods and solution paradigms, respectively. For each type of dataset or approach, we thoroughly introduce and summarize previous efforts and further compare them with each other to provide deeper analyses. In the end, we also discuss promising directions and offer our thoughts to facilitate future research. This survey is for both beginners and experts in cross-lingual summarization, and we hope it will serve as a starting point as well as a source of new ideas for researchers and engineers interested in this area.

Considering the importance of building a good Visual Dialog (VD) Questioner, many researchers study the topic under a Q-Bot-A-Bot image-guessing game setting, where the Questioner needs to raise a series of questions to collect information of an undisclosed image. Despite progress has been made in Supervised Learning (SL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), issues still exist. Firstly, previous methods do not provide explicit and effective guidance for Questioner to generate visually related and informative questions. Secondly, the effect of RL is hampered by an incompetent component, i.e., the Guesser, who makes image predictions based on the generated dialogs and assigns rewards accordingly. To enhance VD Questioner: 1) we propose a Related entity enhanced Questioner (ReeQ) that generates questions under the guidance of related entities and learns entity-based questioning strategy from human dialogs; 2) we propose an Augmented Guesser that is strong and is optimized for VD especially. Experimental results on the VisDial v1.0 dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image-guessing task and question diversity. Human study further verifies that our model generates more visually related, informative and coherent questions.