CroCoSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Code-Switched Summarization

Ruochen Zhang, Carsten Eickhoff


Abstract
Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) has attracted increasing interest in recent years due to the availability of large-scale web-mined datasets and the advancements of multilingual language models. However, given the rareness of naturally occurring CLS resources, the majority of datasets are forced to rely on translation which can contain overly literal artifacts. This restricts our ability to observe naturally occurring CLS pairs that capture organic diction, including instances of code-switching. This alteration between languages in mid-message is a common phenomenon in multilingual settings yet has been largely overlooked in cross-lingual contexts due to data scarcity. To address this gap, we introduce CroCoSum, a dataset of cross-lingual code-switched summarization of technology news. It consists of over 24,000 English source articles and 18,000 human-written Chinese news summaries, with more than 92% of the summaries containing code-switched phrases. For reference, we evaluate the performance of existing approaches including pipeline, end-to-end, and zero-shot methods. We show that leveraging existing CLS resources as a pretraining step does not improve performance on CroCoSum, indicating the limited generalizability of current datasets. Finally, we discuss the challenges of evaluating cross-lingual summarizers on code-switched generation through qualitative error analyses.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.367
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4113–4126
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.367
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruochen Zhang and Carsten Eickhoff. 2024. CroCoSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Code-Switched Summarization. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4113–4126, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
CroCoSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Code-Switched Summarization (Zhang & Eickhoff, LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.367.pdf