Cross Lingual Abstractive Summarization for Marathi
Asang Dani, Shailesh R Sathe
Abstract
Text summarization is an important task for advancing natural language processing (NLP) research and applications in Indic languages. Despite progress in extractive and abstractive summarization, both monolingual summarization (MS) and cross-lingual summarization (CLS) remain relatively underexplored for these languages. Recent advances in Transformer architectures, pretrained language models (PLMs), and dataset availability offer new opportunities to address this gap. In this work, we construct cross-lingual training data from the monolingual Marathi MahaSum corpus and combine it with the smaller cross-lingual PMIndiaSum dataset to fine-tune IndicTrans2, an Indic neural machine translation model. We evaluate the resulting models using ROUGE, chrF and chrF++ metrics, focusing primarily on Marathi-to-English summarization due to computational constraints. We also discuss the applicability of our approach to the English-to-Marathi direction. Our experiments demonstrate that leveraging a pretrained translation model yields substantially better summarization performance than the IndicBART and mBART-50 based baselines reported in previous work on cross-lingual summarization.