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ZASCA-sum : a dataset of the South Africa supreme courts of appeal judgments and media summaries for legal documents summarization research
(Elsevier, 2025-06) Adulmumin, Idris; Marivate, Vukosi
This paper presents ZASCA-Sum, a novel dataset comprising judgments from the South Africa Supreme Court of Appeal and their manually curated media summaries. The dataset, collected from the court's official website, includes 4171 judgments, of which 2118 have summary pairs. The judgments and summaries have been extracted and prepared to support legal document summarization tasks across supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised settings. This paper provides a detailed description of the dataset, covering the data collection process, timeline, processing, and potential applications in the field. We provide the token-count distribution and analysis of the judgments and summaries that can be accommodated off-the-shelf by current summarization models with the largest input token size. The dataset, split into training, validation, and test sets, is made publicly available to encourage research in legal summarization. In addition to document summarization, researchers can use this data to localize English-centric models to support the South African dialect.
Dr Spur’s mystery case : the case of asthma, autoimmunity and an unexpected diagnosis
(Allergy Society of South Africa, 2025-06) Van den Berg, Sylvia; Brauer, Marieke; Van Niekerk, Andre
Thank you for seeing this 27-year-old woman referred from my practice for recurrent lower respiratory tract infections, chronic sinusitis and worsening eczema. Her main complaints are fatigue, weight loss and joint stiffness over the past year. She was previously diagnosed with asthma (due to persistent wheeze since adolescence), autoimmune thyroiditis and a psoriasis/eczema overlap. Her family history is notable for the death of a sibling in early childhood from pneumonia.
Dr Spur’s mystery case : a case of fragile defences
(Allergy Society of South Africa, 2025-09) Swanepoel, Petri; Van den Berg, Sylvia; Van Niekerk, Andre
I am treating a ten-month-old boy diagnosed with di George syndrome. He has a history of failure to thrive, which was mostly attributed to his cardiac anomalies (more specifically, a ventricular septal defect which has since been repaired). I am concerned about his infection history. Over the past four months he has experienced multiple episodes of upper respiratory tract infections characterised by nasal congestion, clear to mucopurulent rhinorrhoea, intermittent low-grade fever, cough (initially dry, progressing to a productive cough with occasional wheezing), feeding dif昀椀culties and refusal of feeds during episodes. He does not have any palatal anomalies. Despite symptomatic treatment with nasal saline irrigation, antipyretics and antibiotics on at least two occasions, the symptoms would resolve slowly over 10–14 days, only to recur within another week or two. Between infections, he never seems to return to baseline, exhibiting a persistent nasal discharge and a ‘wheezy chest’.
A laissez-faire approach to short bursts of corticosteroids may lead to over- exposure in the fetus and the young child
(Allergy Society of South Africa, 2025-03) Delport, Suzanne D.; suzanne.delport@up.ac.za
Corticosteroids, in whichever form they occur, are potent drugs with serious short- and long-term side effects. Their indications for use encompass many diseases and all age groups, even extending to the fetus. In view of the potency and dangers of corticosteroids though, those who prescribe them must do so only for evidence-based indications and with informed consent. Documenting all exposures reflects corticosteroid stewardship and an awareness of a cumulative end point which determines toxicity rather than the dose and duration of therapy.
Decolonising pedagogy in post-apartheid South Africa : the expanded understanding of Vygotsky’s theory and new postulates
(Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, 2025) Muthivhi, Azwihangwisi Edward; azwihangwisi.muthivhi@up.ac.za
CONTEXT AND RELEVANCE : The paper examines contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy and its underlying epistemologies that position teachers and their students as passively conforming to prescribed knowledge and concepts disconnected from practical realities, goals, and students’ personal pursuit of meanings.
OBJECTIVE AND HYPOTHESIS : Such an approach, premised on values of adaptation to the status quo of preexisting models and procedures, fails to promote knowledge premised on values of contribution to collective social practices and self-identity development.
THEORETICAL BASIS : That is, pedagogy so conceptualised in the logic of colonial orthodoxies and solipsistic epistemologies, inevitably denies students and their teachers their inherent capacities for agency and meaningful engagement with reality.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION : Therefore, in instantiating decolonising approach to pedagogy, a young student the teacher had deemed to be experiencing learning difficulties, enacts her embodied knowledge1 and is thereby posited as debunking the logic of colonial epistemologies that underpin contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy.
CONCLUSIONS : The student is therefore presented as enacting her culturally situated community practices and knowledge traditions which she embodies, despite the continued exclusion of such knowledge practices within contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy.