Exploring News Summarization and Enrichment in a Highly Resource-Scarce Indian Language: A Case Study of Mizo

TL;DR

This study explores a methodology for generating comprehensive summaries of Mizo news articles by leveraging English news, addressing resource scarcity and improving information coverage in a low-resource language.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple approach to enrich Mizo news summaries using English news, and provides a dataset of 500 articles with enriched summaries for research.

Findings

Human evaluation shows significant improvement in information coverage.

The approach effectively supplements scarce Mizo news resources.

A new dataset of 500 enriched Mizo news articles is released.

Abstract

Obtaining sufficient information in one's mother tongue is crucial for satisfying the information needs of the users. While high-resource languages have abundant online resources, the situation is less than ideal for very low-resource languages. Moreover, the insufficient reporting of vital national and international events continues to be a worry, especially in languages with scarce resources, like \textbf{Mizo}. In this paper, we conduct a study to investigate the effectiveness of a simple methodology designed to generate a holistic summary for Mizo news articles, which leverages English-language news to supplement and enhance the information related to the corresponding news events. Furthermore, we make available 500 Mizo news articles and corresponding enriched holistic summaries. Human evaluation confirms that our approach significantly enhances the information coverage of Mizo news articles. The mizo dataset and code can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/barvin04/mizo_enrichment