Augmenting Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization with Progression-Grounded Training and Prompting

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS), generating summaries in one language from source documents in another language, offers invaluable assistance in enabling global access to information for people worldwide. State-of-the-art neural summarization models typically train or fine-tune language models on large-scale corpora. However, this is difficult to achieve in realistic low-resource scenarios due to the lack of domain-specific annotated data. In this article, we present a novel cross-lingual summarization model that utilizes progressive training with mBART and employs reinforcement learning to optimize discrete prompts, which addresses low-resource cross-lingual summarization through a two-pronged approach. During training, we introduce a progressive approach based on mBART, which allows the pre-trained model to gradually acquire the ability to compress information, develop cross-lingual capabilities, and ultimately adapt to specific summarization tasks. During downstream summarization, we employ a discrete-prompts joint pre-trained model based on reinforcement learning optimization to achieve low-resource cross-lingual summarization. Experimental results on four cross-lingual summarization datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and superiority compared to six baselines in low-resource scenarios.