DomainSum: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Shift in Abstractive Text Summarization

Haohan Yuan, Haopeng Zhang


Abstract
Most research on abstractive summarization focuses on single-domain applications, often neglecting how domain shifts between documents affect performance and the generalization ability of summarization models. To address this issue, we introduce DomainSum, a hierarchical benchmark designed to capture fine-grained domain shifts in abstractive summarization. We categorize these shifts into three levels: genre, style, and topic, and demonstrate through comprehensive benchmark analysis that they follow a hierarchical structure. Furthermore, we evaluate the domain generalization capabilities of commonly used pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Our benchmark and source code are released at https://github.com/hpzhang94/DomainSum.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.118
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2219–2231
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.118/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haohan Yuan and Haopeng Zhang. 2025. DomainSum: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Shift in Abstractive Text Summarization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 2219–2231, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DomainSum: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Shift in Abstractive Text Summarization (Yuan & Zhang, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.118.pdf