Cross-Lingual Summarization via ChatGPT

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary in a different target language. Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. However, it is not yet known the performance of ChatGPT on CLS. In this report, we empirically use various prompts to guide ChatGPT to perform zero-shot CLS from different paradigms (i.e., end-to-end and pipeline), and provide a preliminary evaluation on its generated summaries.We find that ChatGPT originally prefers to produce lengthy summaries with more detailed information. But with the help of an interactive prompt, ChatGPT can balance between informativeness and conciseness, and significantly improve its CLS performance. Experimental results on three widely-used CLS datasets show that ChatGPT outperforms the advanced GPT 3.5 model (i.e., text-davinci-003). In addition, we provide qualitative case studies to show the superiority of ChatGPT on CLS.