Introducing the Welsh Text Summarisation Dataset and Baseline Systems

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 revitalisation 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 summarisation. The dataset was created by Welsh speakers through manually summarising Welsh Wikipedia articles. In addition, the paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of different summarisation systems for Welsh. The summarisation systems and results will serve as benchmarks for the development of summarisers in other minority language contexts.