While summarization has been extensively researched in natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual cross-temporal summarization (CLCTS) is a largely unexplored area that has the potential to improve cross-cultural accessibility, information sharing, and understanding. This paper comprehensively addresses the CLCTS task, including dataset creation, modeling, and evaluation. We build the first CLCTS corpus, leveraging historical fictive texts and Wikipedia summaries in English and German, and examine the effectiveness of popular transformer end-to-end models with different intermediate task finetuning tasks. Additionally, we explore the potential of ChatGPT for CLCTS as a summarizer and an evaluator. Overall, we report evaluations from humans, ChatGPT, and several recent automatic evaluation metrics where we find our intermediate task finetuned end-to-end models generate bad to moderate quality summaries; ChatGPT as a summarizer (without any finetuning) provides moderate to good quality outputs and as an evaluator correlates moderately with human evaluations though it is prone to giving lower scores. ChatGPT also seems to be very adept at normalizing historical text. We finally test ChatGPT in a scenario with adversarially attacked and unseen source documents and find that ChatGPT is better at omission and entity swap than negating against its prior knowledge.

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