A thousand stars for a reading list: summarization's living bibliography
A manually curated, chronically updated index of NLP summarization papers that predates and now tracks the ChatGPT era.

What it does This repository is a curated bibliography of text summarization research, maintained by Xiachong Feng and collaborators since at least 2019. It catalogs papers with PDF links, abstracts, and occasional presentation slides, organized by era—from foundational work through the current “Big Model” wave of LLM experiments.
The interesting bit The project functions as a community time capsule. It includes a “Summarization Learning Route” PDF and a “Trending” visualization, suggesting an attempt to map the field’s evolution rather than simply dump links. The maintainers also collect their own talks and Chinese-language blog posts, making it a rare bridge between English conference proceedings and Chinese NLP communities.
Key highlights
- Covers extractive, abstractive, dialogue, cross-lingual, and multimodal summarization
- Tracks LLM-era papers explicitly: ChatGPT for evaluation, radiology report summarization, temporal generalization benchmarks
- Includes original presentations and notes from ACL/EMNLP 2019–2022
- Provides a structured learning route PDF for newcomers
- Mix of English papers and Chinese-language explanatory content
Caveats
- The README is essentially a long, manually edited HTML document; there is no search, no tagging system, no automation visible
- “Trending” section appears to be a static image, not live data
- No clear criteria for inclusion or update frequency stated
Verdict Worth bookmarking if you’re entering summarization research or need to trace how the field pivoted from RNNs to BERT to ChatGPT experiments. Skip if you want systematic meta-analyses or reproducible code; this is a reading list with commentary, not a toolkit.