# V=arta: A Large-Scale Headline-Generation Dataset for Indic Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05858/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00685/) (2015)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Pre-trained Checkpoints for Sequence Generation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12461/) (2019)
- [MLSUM: The Multilingual Summarization Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14900/) (2020)
- [IndicNLG Benchmark: Multilingual Datasets for Diverse NLG Tasks in Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05437/) (2022)
- [IndicBART: A Pre-trained Model for Indic Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02903/) (2021)
- [Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11921/) (2021)
- [Minimax and Neyman-Pearson Meta-Learning for Outlier Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01051/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08638/) (2024)
- [PMIndiaSum: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Headline Summarization for Languages in India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08828/) (2023)
- [Text Generation Models for Luxembourgish with Limited Data: A Balanced Multilingual Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09415/) (2024)
- [Beyond LLM-as-a-Judge: Deterministic Metrics for Multilingual Generative Text Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05083/) (2026)
- [Sequence-to-Sequence Spanish Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11259/) (2023)
- [COSMMIC: Comment-Sensitive Multimodal Multilingual Indian Corpus for Summarization and Headline Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15372/) (2025)
- [BeliN: A Novel Corpus for Bengali Religious News Headline Generation using Contextual Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01069/) (2025)
- [AKCIT-FN at CheckThat! 2025: Switching Fine-Tuned SLMs and LLM Prompting for Multilingual Claim Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11496/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present V=arta, a large-scale multilingual dataset for headline generation in Indic languages. This dataset includes 41.8 million news articles in 14 different Indic languages (and English), which come from a variety of high-quality sources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest collection of curated articles for Indic languages currently available. We use the data collected in a series of experiments to answer important questions related to Indic NLP and multilinguality research in general. We show that the dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art abstractive models and that they perform only slightly better than extractive baselines. Owing to its size, we also show that the dataset can be used to pretrain strong language models that outperform competitive baselines in both NLU and NLG benchmarks.