XWikiGen: Cross-lingual Summarization for Encyclopedic Text Generation in Low Resource Languages
Abstract
Lack of encyclopedic text contributors, especially on Wikipedia, makes automated text generation for low resource (LR) languages a critical problem. Existing work on Wikipedia text generation has focused on English only where English reference articles are summarized to generate English Wikipedia pages. But, for low-resource languages, the scarcity of reference articles makes monolingual summarization ineffective in solving this problem. Hence, in this work, we propose XWikiGen, which is the task of cross-lingual multi-document summarization of text from multiple reference articles, written in various languages, to generate Wikipedia-style text. Accordingly, we contribute a benchmark dataset, XWikiRef, spanning ~69K Wikipedia articles covering five domains and eight languages. We harness this dataset to train a two-stage system where the input is a set of citations and a section title and the output is a section-specific LR summary. The proposed system is based on a novel idea of neural unsupervised extractive summarization to coarsely identify salient information followed by a neural abstractive model to generate the section-specific text. Extensive experiments show that multi-domain training is better than the multi-lingual setup on average.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.12308,
title = {XWikiGen: Cross-lingual Summarization for Encyclopedic Text Generation in Low Resource Languages},
author = {Dhaval Taunk and Shivprasad Sagare and Anupam Patil and Shivansh Subramanian and Manish Gupta and Vasudeva Varma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12308},
year = {2023}
}