@inproceedings{prasanth-2026-translation,
    title = "Translation-Augmented Multilingual Summarization for Low-Resource Languages",
    author = "Prasanth",
    editor = "Chakravarthi, Bharathi Raja  and
      B, Bharathi  and
      Buitelaar, Paul  and
      Thenmozhi, Durairaj  and
      Garc{\'i}a Cumbreras, Miguel {\'A}ngel  and
      Jim{\'e}nez Zafra, Salud Mar{\'i}a",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Virtual (Online)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.ltedi-1.10/",
    pages = "108--117",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-424-8",
    abstract = "While automatic text summarization has achieved remarkable success in English,extending these capabilities to low-resource languages remains a significantchallenge due to the scarcity of labeled training data. We propose atranslation-augmented approach to multilingual summarization: we systematicallytranslate high-quality English summarization corpora into low-resource targetlanguages using NLLB-200, and use the resulting parallel data to train andevaluate sequence-to-sequence models. We experiment across three typologicallydiverse languages{---}Swahili, Hausa, and Afrikaans{---}comparing monolingualfine-tuning (MONO), cross-lingual transfer (XLT), and joint multilingualtraining (TAMT) on mBART-large-50. Monolingual fine-tuning achieves the bestperformance for Swahili (ROUGE-L 13.9) and Afrikaans (ROUGE-L 15.7),surpassing the Lead-3 baseline in both cases, while cross-lingual transferremains strongest for Hausa (ROUGE-L 14.5). We show that native language tokenavailability in mBART-50 is a critical determinant of fine-tuning performance,and characterize the conditions under which the theoretically expectedTAMT $>$ MONO $>$ XLT ordering breaks down. We release our dataset, code, andevaluation infrastructure to support future research on low-resourcemultilingual summarization."
}