Data-Centric Evaluation of Arabic Abstractive Summarization Using a Large-scale Curated News Corpus

Abstract

This paper introduces MAAD, a high-quality, carefully constructed and curated by the authors large-scale Arabic dataset for abstractive news summarisation. The authors selected a high-quality subset of 50,000 articles from the dataset Original, which contains 602,792 articles. To maintain the quality, diversity, and training suitability of the subset, the subset underwent a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline involving noise removal, duplicate filtering, linguistic normalisation, and expert validation. The experimental evaluation was executed in two phases. In the first phase, three transformer-based models (ArabicT5, AraBART, and mT5) were evaluated on a controlled subset of 1,110 articles to establish fair baseline comparisons among models, where ArabicT5 achieved the best performance (ROUGE-1: 23.64, ROUGE-2: 11.82, ROUGE-L: 22.10). In the second phase, ArabicT5-base was trained on all 50,000 articles to evaluate scalability, achieving substantially improved results of 68.4, 52.3, and 64.1, respectively, with a BLEU score of 58.7. The findings emphasise the significance of scale, effective preprocessing, and the benefits of Arabic-specific pretraining on the quality of summarisation. Moreover, a human evaluation on 500 randomly sampled instances verified fluency and adequacy scores of 4.86 and 4.35, respectively, with a strong inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's Kappa: 0.78 and 0.74). Overall, the findings indicate that MAAD is a reliable and scalable dataset with strong potential to serve as a benchmark for Arabic abstractive summarisation and to support the development of robust transformer-based models.