Varta: A Large-Scale Headline-Generation Dataset for Indic Languages

Rahul Aralikatte, Ziling Cheng, Sumanth Doddapaneni, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung


Abstract
We present Varta, a large-scale multilingual dataset for headline generation in Indic languages. This dataset includes more than 41 million pairs of headlines and articles in 14 different Indic languages (and English), which come from a variety of high-quality news sources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest collection of curated news articles for Indic languages currently available. We use the collected data in a series of experiments to answer important questions related to Indic NLP and multilinguality research in general. We show that the dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art abstractive models and that they perform only slightly better than extractive baselines. Owing to its size, we also show that the dataset can be used to pre-train strong language models that outperform competitive baselines in both NLU and NLG benchmarks.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.215
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3468–3492
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.215
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.215
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rahul Aralikatte, Ziling Cheng, Sumanth Doddapaneni, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. 2023. Varta: A Large-Scale Headline-Generation Dataset for Indic Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 3468–3492, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Varta: A Large-Scale Headline-Generation Dataset for Indic Languages (Aralikatte et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
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