Summarising Historical Text in Modern Languages
Xutan Peng, Yi Zheng, Chenghua Lin, Advaith Siddharthan · 2021
We introduce the task of historical text summarisation, where documents in historical forms of a language are summarised in the corresponding modern language.This is a fundamentally important routine to historians and digital humanities researchers but has never been automated.We compile a high-quality gold-standard text summarisation dataset, which consists of historical German and Chinese news from hundreds of years ago summarised in modern German or Chinese.Based on cross-lingual transfer learning techniques, we propose a summarisation model that can be trained even with no cross-lingual (historical to modern) parallel data, and further benchmark it against state-of-the-art algorithms.We report automatic and human evaluations that distinguish the historic to modern language summarisation task from standard cross-lingual summarisation (i.e., modern to modern language), highlight the distinctness and value of our dataset, and demonstrate that our transfer learning approach outperforms standard cross-lingual benchmarks on this task.DE №34 Story Jhre Königl.Majest.befinden sich noch vnweit Thorn / ... / dahero zur Erledigung Hoffnung gemacht werden will.(Their Royal Majesties are still not far from Torn, ... , therefore completion of the hope is desired.)Summary Der Krieg zwischen Polen und Schweden dauert an.Von einem Friedensvertrag ist noch nicht der Rede.(The war between Poland and Sweden continues.There is still no talk on the peace treaty.)ZH №7 Story 有脚夫小民，三四千名集众围绕马监丞衙门，...，冒火突入，捧出敕印。 (Three to four thousand porters gathered around Majiancheng Yamen (a government office), ..., rushed into fire and salvaged the authority's seal.)Summary 小本生意免税条约未能落实，小商贩被严重剥削，以致百姓聚众闹事并火烧衙门，造成多人伤亡。王炀 抢救出公章。 (The tax-exemption act for small businesses was not well implemented and small traders were terribly exploited, leading to riot and arson attack on Yamen with many casualties.Yang Wang salvaged the authority's seal.)