# AfriHG: News headline generation for African Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20223/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [XL-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13822/) (2021)
- [Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07827/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BeliN: A Novel Corpus for Bengali Religious News Headline Generation using Contextual Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01069/) (2025)
- [MzansiText and MzansiLM: An Open Corpus and Decoder-Only Language Model for South African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20732/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces AfriHG -- a news headline generation dataset created by combining from XLSum and MasakhaNEWS datasets focusing on 16 languages widely spoken by Africa. We experimented with two seq2eq models (mT5-base and AfriTeVa V2), and Aya-101 LLM. Our results show that Africa-centric seq2seq models such as AfriTeVa V2 outperform the massively multilingual mT5-base model. Finally, we show that the performance of fine-tuning AfriTeVa V2 with 313M parameters is competitive to prompting Aya-101 LLM with more than 13B parameters.