Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles

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 <PRE_TAG>abstractive modeling</POST_TAG> 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 <PRE_TAG>abstractive models</POST_TAG>.