This paper introduces MediaSum, a large-scale media interview dataset consisting of 463.6K transcripts with abstractive summaries. To create this dataset, we collect interview transcripts from NPR and CNN and employ the overview and topic description
s as summaries. Compared with existing public corpora for dialogue summarization, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger and contains complex multi-party conversations from multiple domains. We conduct statistical analysis to demonstrate the unique positional bias exhibited in the transcripts of televised and radioed interviews. We also show that MediaSum can be used in transfer learning to improve a model's performance on other dialogue summarization tasks.
