XLSum English

Large-scale multilingual abstractive summarization dataset comprising 1 million professionally annotated article-summary pairs from BBC, covering 44 languages. XL-Sum is highly abstractive, concise, and of high quality, designed to encourage research on multilingual abstractive summarization tasks.

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct from NVIDIA currently leads the XLSum English leaderboard with a score of 0.316 across 1 evaluated AI models.

Paper
About this benchmark

What XLSum English measures

XLSum English is a text benchmark that evaluates large language models on language and summarization tasks. LLM Stats tracks 1 model on this benchmark, with a maximum possible score of 1. Current average across reported models is 0.3, with the leader reaching 0.3.

Compare leaders on the best AI for language and best AI for summarization leaderboards.

Publication

Paper
XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages
Authors
Tahmid Hasan, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Md Saiful Islam, Kazi Samin, and 4 others
Published

Abstract

Contemporary works on abstractive text summarization have focused primarily on high-resource languages like English, mostly due to the limited availability of datasets for low/mid-resource ones. In this work, we present XL-Sum, a comprehensive and diverse dataset comprising 1 million professionally annotated article-summary pairs from BBC, extracted using a set of carefully designed heuristics. The dataset covers 44 languages ranging from low to high-resource, for many of which no public dataset is currently available. XL-Sum is highly abstractive, concise, and of high quality, as indicated by human and intrinsic evaluation. We fine-tune mT5, a state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual model, with XL-Sum and experiment on multilingual and low-resource summarization tasks. XL-Sum induces competitive results compared to the ones obtained using similar monolingual datasets: we show higher than 11 ROUGE-2 scores on 10 languages we benchmark on, with some of them exceeding 15, as obtained by multilingual training. Additionally, training on low-resource languages individually also provides competitive performance. To the best of our knowledge, XL-Sum is the largest abstractive summarization dataset in terms of the number of samples collected from a single source and the number of languages covered. We are releasing our dataset and models to encourage future research on multilingual abstractive summarization. The resources can be found at \url{https://github.com/csebuetnlp/xl-sum}.

Progress Over Time

Interactive timeline showing model performance evolution on XLSum English

State-of-the-art frontier
Open
Proprietary

XLSum English Leaderboard

1 models
ContextCostLicense
170B
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FAQ

Common questions about XLSum English.

What is the XLSum English benchmark?

Large-scale multilingual abstractive summarization dataset comprising 1 million professionally annotated article-summary pairs from BBC, covering 44 languages. XL-Sum is highly abstractive, concise, and of high quality, designed to encourage research on multilingual abstractive summarization tasks.

What is the XLSum English leaderboard?

The XLSum English leaderboard ranks 1 AI models based on their performance on this benchmark. Currently, Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct by NVIDIA leads with a score of 0.316. The average score across all models is 0.316.

What is the highest XLSum English score?

The highest XLSum English score is 0.316, achieved by Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct from NVIDIA.

How many models are evaluated on XLSum English?

1 models have been evaluated on the XLSum English benchmark, with 0 verified results and 1 self-reported results.

Where can I find the XLSum English paper?

The XLSum English paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13822. The paper details the methodology, dataset construction, and evaluation criteria.

What categories does XLSum English cover?

XLSum English is categorized under language and summarization. The benchmark evaluates text models with multilingual support.

What is the best open-source model on XLSum English?

Llama 3.1 Nemotron 70B Instruct by NVIDIA is the top-ranked open-source model on XLSum English, with a score of 0.316 (rank #1).

How recent are the XLSum English leaderboard results?

The XLSum English leaderboard was last updated in June 2026 and currently includes 1 evaluated models.

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