Cross-lingual Cross-temporal Summarization: Dataset, Models, Evaluation

While summarization has been extensively researched in natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual cross-temporal summarization (CLCTS) is a largely unexplored area that has the potential to improve cross-cultural accessibility and understanding. This paper comprehensively addresses the CLCTS task, including dataset creation, modeling, and evaluation. We (1) build the first CLCTS corpus with 328 (+127) instances for hDe-En and 289 (+212) for hEn-De, leveraging historical fiction texts and Wikipedia summaries in English and German; (2) examine the effectiveness of popular transformer end-to-end models with different intermediate finetuning tasks; (3) explore the potential of GPT-3.5 as a summarizer; (4) report evaluations from humans, GPT-4, and several recent automatic evaluation metrics. Our results indicate that intermediate task finetuned end-to-end models generate bad to moderate quality summaries while GPT-3.5, as a zero-shot summarizer, provides moderate to good quality outputs. GPT-3.5 also seems very adept at normalizing historical text. To assess data contamination in GPT-3.5, we design an adversarial attack scheme in which we find that GPT-3.5 performs slightly worse for unseen source documents compared to seen documents. Moreover, it sometimes hallucinates when the source sentences are inverted against its prior knowledge with a summarization accuracy of 0.67 for plot omission, 0.71 for entity swap, and 0.53 for plot negation. Overall, our regression results of model performances suggest that longer, older, and more complex source texts (all of which are more characteristic for historical language variants) are harder to summarize for all models, indicating the difficulty of the CLCTS task. Regarding evaluation, we observe that both GPT-4 and BERTScore correlate moderately with human evaluations but GPT-4 is prone to giving lower scores.