@inproceedings{scire-etal-2023-echoes,
    title = "Echoes from Alexandria: A Large Resource for Multilingual Book Summarization",
    author = "Scir{\`e}, Alessandro  and
      Conia, Simone  and
      Ciciliano, Simone  and
      Navigli, Roberto",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.54",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.54",
    pages = "853--867",
    abstract = "In recent years, research in text summarization has mainly focused on the news domain, where texts are typically short and have strong layout features. The task of full-book summarization presents additional challenges which are hard to tackle with current resources, due to their limited size and availability in English only. To overcome these limitations, we present {``}Echoes from Alexandria{''}, or in shortened form, {``}Echoes{''}, a large resource for multilingual book summarization. Echoes featuresthree novel datasets: i) Echo-Wiki, for multilingual book summarization, ii) Echo-XSum, for extremely-compressive multilingual book summarization, and iii) Echo-FairySum, for extractive book summarization. To the best of our knowledge, Echoes {--} with its thousands of books and summaries {--} is the largest resource, and the first to be multilingual, featuring 5 languages and 25 language pairs. In addition to Echoes, we also introduce a new extractive-then-abstractive baseline, and, supported by our experimental results and manual analysis of the summaries generated, we argue that this baseline is more suitable for book summarization than purely-abstractive approaches. We release our resource and software at \url{https://github.com/Babelscape/echoes-from-alexandria} in the hope of fostering innovative research in multilingual booksummarization.",
}

In recent years, research in text summarization has mainly focused on the news domain, where texts are typically short and have strong layout features. The task of full-book summarization presents additional challenges which are hard to tackle with current resources, due to their limited size and availability in English only. To overcome these limitations, we present {``}Echoes from Alexandria{''}, or in shortened form, {``}Echoes{''}, a large resource for multilingual book summarization. Echoes featuresthree novel datasets: i) Echo-Wiki, for multilingual book summarization, ii) Echo-XSum, for extremely-compressive multilingual book summarization, and iii) Echo-FairySum, for extractive book summarization. To the best of our knowledge, Echoes {--} with its thousands of books and summaries {--} is the largest resource, and the first to be multilingual, featuring 5 languages and 25 language pairs. In addition to Echoes, we also introduce a new extractive-then-abstractive baseline, and, supported by our experimental results and manual analysis of the summaries generated, we argue that this baseline is more suitable for book summarization than purely-abstractive approaches. We release our resource and software at \url{https://github.com/Babelscape/echoes-from-alexandria} in the hope of fostering innovative research in multilingual booksummarization.
Scir{\`e}, Aless ro Conia, Simone Ciciliano, Simone Navigli, Roberto
Echoes from Alexandria: A Large Resource for Multilingual Book Summarization