Swahili, spoken by around 200 million people primarily in Tanzania and Kenya, has been the focus of our research for the GEM Shared Task at INLG’24 on Underrepresented Language Summarization. We have utilized the XLSUM dataset and have manually summarized 1000 texts from a Swahili news classification dataset. To achieve the desired results, we have tested abstractive summarizers (mT5_multilingual_XLSum, t5-small, mBART-50), and an extractive summarizer (based on PageRank algorithm). But our adopted model consists of an integrated extractive-abstractive model combining the Bert Extractive Summarizer with some abstractive summarizers (t5-small, mBART-50). The integrated model overcome the drawbacks of both the extractive and abstractive summarization system and utilizes the benefit from both of it. Extractive summarizer shorten the paragraphs exceeding 512 tokens, ensuring no important information has been lost before applying the abstractive models. The abstractive summarizer use its pretrained knowledge and ensure to generate context based summary.

In recent days, propaganda has started to influence public opinion increasingly as social media usage continues to grow. Our research has been part of the first challenge, Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection of ArAIEval shared task at the ArabicNLP 2024 conference, co-located with ACL 2024, identifying specific Arabic text spans using twenty-three propaganda techniques. We have augmented underrepresented techniques in the provided dataset using synonym replacement and have evaluated various machine learning (RF, SVM, MNB), deep learning (BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (bert-base-arabic, Marefa-NER, AraBERT) with transfer learning. Our comparative study has shown that the transformer model “bert-base-arabic” has outperformed other models. Evaluating the test set, it has achieved the micro-F1 score of 0.2995 which is the highest. This result has secured our team “CUET_sstm” first place among all participants in task 1 of the ArAIEval.