Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems
This work addresses the lack of digital resources for Welsh, a minority language, by providing a foundational dataset and benchmarks to support its revitalization and technological development.
The paper introduces the first Welsh text summarization dataset, created by manually summarizing Welsh Wikipedia articles, and provides baseline systems and results to serve as benchmarks for minority language contexts.
Welsh is an official language in Wales and is spoken by an estimated 884,300 people (29.2% of the population of Wales). Despite this status and estimated increase in speaker numbers since the last (2011) census, Welsh remains a minority language undergoing revitalization and promotion by Welsh Government and relevant stakeholders. As part of the effort to increase the availability of Welsh digital technology, this paper introduces the first Welsh summarisation dataset, which we provide freely for research purposes to help advance the work on Welsh text summarization. The dataset was created by Welsh speakers by manually summarising Welsh Wikipedia articles. In addition, the paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of different summarisation systems for Welsh. The summarization systems and results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarises in other minority language contexts.