HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrew

Itai Mondshine, Tzuf Paz-Argaman, Asaf Achi Mordechai, Reut Tsarfaty


Abstract
While large language models (LLMs) excel in various natural language tasks in English, their performance in low-resource languages like Hebrew, especially for generative tasks such as abstractive summarization, remains unclear. The high morphological richness in Hebrew adds further challenges due to the ambiguity in sentence comprehension and the complexities in meaning construction. In this paper, we address this evaluation and resource gap by introducing HeSum, a novel benchmark dataset specifically designed for Hebrew abstractive text summarization. HeSum consists of 10,000 article-summary pairs sourced from Hebrew news websites written by professionals. Linguistic analysis confirms HeSum’s high abstractness and unique morphological challenges. We show that HeSum presents distinct difficulties even for state-of-the-art LLMs, establishing it as a valuable testbed for advancing generative language technology in Hebrew, and MRLs generative challenges in general.
Anthology ID:
2024.loresmt-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Chao-hong Liu, Ekaterina Vylomova, Flammie Pirinen, Jade Abbott, Jonathan Washington, Nathaniel Oco, Valentin Malykh, Varvara Logacheva, Xiaobing Zhao
Venues:
LoResMT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
26–36
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.loresmt-1.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Itai Mondshine, Tzuf Paz-Argaman, Asaf Achi Mordechai, and Reut Tsarfaty. 2024. HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrew. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2024), pages 26–36, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HeSum: a Novel Dataset for Abstractive Text Summarization in Hebrew (Mondshine et al., LoResMT-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.loresmt-1.2.pdf