KhabarChin: Automatic Detection of Important News in the Persian Language

Abstract: Being aware of important news is crucial for staying informed and making well-informed decisions efficiently. NLP approaches can significantly automate this process. This paper introduces the detection of important news, in a previously unexplored area, and presents a new benchmarking dataset (Khabarchin) for detecting important news in the Persian language. We define important news articles as those deemed significant for a considerable portion of society, capable of influencing their mindset or decision-making. The news articles are obtained from seven different prominent Persian news agencies, resulting in the annotation of 7,869 samples and the creation of the dataset. Two challenges of high disagreement and imbalance between classes were faced, and solutions were provided for them. We also propose several learning-based models, ranging from conventional machine learning to state-of-the-art transformer models, to tackle this task. Furthermore, we introduce the second task of important sentence detection in news articles, as they often come with a significant contextual length that makes it challenging for readers to identify important information. We identify these sentences in a weakly supervised manner.