CARPAS: Towards Content-Aware Refinement of Provided Aspects for Summarization in Large Language Models

Yong-En Tian, Yu-Chien Tang, An-Zi Yen, Wen-Chih Peng


Abstract
Aspect-based summarization has attracted significant attention for its ability to generate more fine-grained and user-aligned summaries. While most existing approaches assume a set of predefined aspects as input, real-world scenarios often present challenges where these given aspects may be incomplete, irrelevant, or entirely missing from the document. Users frequently expect systems to adaptively refine or filter the provided aspects based on the actual content. In this paper, we initiate this novel task setting, termed Content-Aware Refinement of Provided Aspects for Summarization (CARPAS), with the aim of dynamically adjusting the provided aspects based on the document context before summarizing. We construct three new datasets and conduct pilot experiments with four representative prompting strategies. Our analysis reveals that LLMs often over-generate aspects, resulting in excessively long and misaligned summaries. Building on this observation, we introduce a two-stage framework that derives lightweight scope guidance before aspect refinement and summarization, improving focus and reducing over-generation. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves performance across all datasets. Moreover, our deeper analyses uncover LLMs’ compliance when the requested number of aspects differs from their own estimations, establishing a crucial insight for the deployment of LLMs in similar real-world applications.
Anthology ID:
2026.finnlp-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Jimin Huang, Yongjae Lee, Sophia Ananiadou, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Hiroya Takamura, Chung-Chi Chen
Venues:
FinNLP | WS
SIG:
SIGFinTech
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
110–124
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.finnlp-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yong-En Tian, Yu-Chien Tang, An-Zi Yen, and Wen-Chih Peng. 2026. CARPAS: Towards Content-Aware Refinement of Provided Aspects for Summarization in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing, pages 110–124, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CARPAS: Towards Content-Aware Refinement of Provided Aspects for Summarization in Large Language Models (Tian et al., FinNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.finnlp-1.11.pdf