Empirical Evaluation of Pre-trained Language Models for Summarizing Moroccan Darija News Articles

Moroccan Dialect (MD), or \textquotedblleftDarija,\textquotedblright is a primary spoken variant of Arabic in Morocco, yet remains underrepresented in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, particularly in tasks like summarization. Despite a growing volume of MD textual data online, there is a lack of robust resources and NLP models tailored to handle the unique linguistic challenges posed by MD. In response, we introduce .MA_v2, an expanded version of the GOUD.MA dataset, containing over 50k articles with their titles across 11 categories. This dataset provides a more comprehensive resource for developing summarization models. We evaluate the application of large language models (LLMs) for MD summarization, utilizing both fine-tuning and zero-shot prompting with encoder-decoder and causal LLMs, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that an expanded dataset improves summarization performance and highlights the capabilities of recent LLMs in handling MD text. We open-source our dataset, fine-tuned models, and all experimental code, establishing a foundation for future advancements in MD NLP. We release the code at https://github.com/AzzedineAftiss/Moroccan-Dialect-Summarization.