Bridging Context Gaps: Enhancing Comprehension in Long-Form Social Conversations Through Contextualized Excerpts

Shrestha Mohanty, Sarah Xuan, Jacob Jobraeel, Anurag Kumar, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara


Abstract
We focus on enhancing comprehension in small-group recorded conversations, which serve as a medium to bring people together and provide a space for sharing personal stories and experiences on crucial social matters. One way to parse and convey information from these conversations is by sharing highlighted excerpts in subsequent conversations. This can help promote a collective understanding of relevant issues, by highlighting perspectives and experiences to other groups of people who might otherwise be unfamiliar with and thus unable to relate to these experiences. The primary challenge that arises then is that excerpts taken from one conversation and shared in another setting might be missing crucial context or key elements that were previously introduced in the original conversation. This problem is exacerbated when conversations become lengthier and richer in themes and shared experiences. To address this, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enrich these excerpts by providing socially relevant context. We present approaches for effective contextualization to improve comprehension, readability, and empathy. We show significant improvements in understanding, as assessed through subjective and objective evaluations. While LLMs can offer valuable context, they struggle with capturing key social aspects. We release the Human-annotated Salient Excerpts (HSE) dataset to support future work. Additionally, we show how context-enriched excerpts can provide more focused and comprehensive conversation summaries.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.683
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10242–10274
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.683/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shrestha Mohanty, Sarah Xuan, Jacob Jobraeel, Anurag Kumar, Deb Roy, and Jad Kabbara. 2025. Bridging Context Gaps: Enhancing Comprehension in Long-Form Social Conversations Through Contextualized Excerpts. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10242–10274, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bridging Context Gaps: Enhancing Comprehension in Long-Form Social Conversations Through Contextualized Excerpts (Mohanty et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.683.pdf