Amharic Abstractive Text Summarization
This work addresses the lack of advanced NLP resources for African languages, specifically Amharic, but is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackles abstractive text summarization for the Amharic language by applying a scheduled sampling model with curriculum learning, aiming to generate meaningful summaries by understanding sentence contexts, though no concrete performance numbers are provided.
Text Summarization is the task of condensing long text into just a handful of sentences. Many approaches have been proposed for this task, some of the very first were building statistical models (Extractive Methods) capable of selecting important words and copying them to the output, however these models lacked the ability to paraphrase sentences, as they simply select important words without actually understanding their contexts nor understanding their meaning, here comes the use of Deep Learning based architectures (Abstractive Methods), which effectively tries to understand the meaning of sentences to build meaningful summaries. In this work we discuss one of these new novel approaches which combines curriculum learning with Deep Learning, this model is called Scheduled Sampling. We apply this work to one of the most widely spoken African languages which is the Amharic Language, as we try to enrich the African NLP community with top-notch Deep Learning architectures.