Opinion summarization research has primarily focused on generating summaries reflecting important opinions from customer reviews without paying much attention to the writing style. In this paper, we propose the stylized opinion summarization task, which aims to generate a summary of customer reviews in the desired (e.g., professional) writing style. To tackle the difficulty in collecting customer and professional review pairs, we develop a non-parallel training framework, Noisy Pairing and Partial Supervision (NAPA), which trains a stylized opinion summarization system from non-parallel customer and professional review sets. We create a benchmark ProSum by collecting customer and professional reviews from Yelp and Michelin. Experimental results on ProSum and FewSum demonstrate that our non-parallel training framework consistently improves both automatic and human evaluations, successfully building a stylized opinion summarization model that can generate professionally-written summaries from customer reviews. The code is available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/napa

There has recently been a growing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to evaluate NLP tasks automatically. Considerable research effort has been put into improving such systems towards achieving high correlations with human judgement. However, it is still unclear what level of correlation is good enough for practical applications of LLM-based automatic evaluation systems. This paper characterizes these LLM evaluators’ confidence in ranking candidate NLP models and develops a configurable Monte Carlo simulation method. We show that even automatic metrics with low correlation with human judgement can reach high-confidence rankings of candidate models with reasonable evaluation set sizes (100s of examples). Further, we describe tradeoff curves between the LLM evaluator performance (i.e., correlation with humans) and evaluation set size; loss in correlation can be compensated with modest increases in the evaluation set size. We validate our results on RoSE, a text summarization dataset, and find our estimates of confidence align with empirical observations.Code available at https://github.com/rickardstureborg/llm-eval-confidence

Neural abstractive summarization models make summaries in an end-to-end manner, and little is known about how the source information is actually converted into summaries. In this paper, we define input sentences that contain essential information in the generated summary as source sentences and study how abstractive summaries are made by analyzing the source sentences. To this end, we annotate source sentences for reference summaries and system summaries generated by PEGASUS on document-summary pairs sampled from the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets. We also formulate automatic source sentence detection and compare multiple methods to establish a strong baseline for the task. Experimental results show that the perplexity-based method performs well in highly abstractive settings, while similarity-based methods perform robustly in relatively extractive settings.

Many people read online reviews to learn about real-world entities of their interest. However, majority of reviews only describes general experiences and opinions of the customers, and may not reveal facts that are specific to the entity being reviewed. In this work, we focus on a novel task of mining from a review corpus sentences that are unique for each entity. We refer to this task as Salient Fact Extraction. Salient facts are extremely scarce due to their very nature. Consequently, collecting labeled examples for training supervised models is tedious and cost-prohibitive. To alleviate this scarcity problem, we develop an unsupervised method, ZL-Distiller, which leverages contextual language representations of the reviews and their distributional patterns to identify salient sentences about entities. Our experiments on multiple domains (hotels, products, and restaurants) show that ZL-Distiller achieves state-of-the-art performance and further boosts the performance of other supervised/unsupervised algorithms for the task. Furthermore, we show that salient sentences mined by ZL-Distiller provide unique and detailed information about entities, which benefit downstream NLP applications including question answering and summarization.

Community-based Question Answering (CQA), which allows users to acquire their desired information, has increasingly become an essential component of online services in various domains such as E-commerce, travel, and dining. However, an overwhelming number of CQA pairs makes it difficult for users without particular intent to find useful information spread over CQA pairs. To help users quickly digest the key information, we propose the novel CQA summarization task that aims to create a concise summary from CQA pairs. To this end, we first design a multi-stage data annotation process and create a benchmark dataset, COQASUM, based on the Amazon QA corpus. We then compare a collection of extractive and abstractive summarization methods and establish a strong baseline approach DedupLED for the CQA summarization task. Our experiment further confirms two key challenges, sentence-type transfer and deduplication removal, towards the CQA summarization task. Our data and code are publicly available.

Opinion summarization focuses on generating summaries that reflect popular subjective information expressed in multiple online reviews. While generated summaries offer general and concise information about a particular hotel or product, the information may be insufficient to help the user compare multiple different choices. Thus, the user may still struggle with the question “Which one should I pick?” In this paper, we propose the comparative opinion summarization task, which aims at generating two contrastive summaries and one common summary from two different candidate sets of reviews. We develop a comparative summarization framework CoCoSum, which consists of two base summarization models that jointly generate contrastive and common summaries. Experimental results on a newly created benchmark CoCoTrip show that CoCoSum can produce higher-quality contrastive and common summaries than state-of-the-art opinion summarization models. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/cocosum

We present the Quantized Transformer (QT), an unsupervised system for extractive opinion summarization. QT is inspired by Vector- Quantized Variational Autoencoders, which we repurpose for popularity-driven summarization. It uses a clustering interpretation of the quantized space and a novel extraction algorithm to discover popular opinions among hundreds of reviews, a significant step towards opinion summarization of practical scope. In addition, QT enables controllable summarization without further training, by utilizing properties of the quantized space to extract aspect-specific summaries. We also make publicly available Space, a large-scale evaluation benchmark for opinion summarizers, comprising general and aspect-specific summaries for 50 hotels. Experiments demonstrate the promise of our approach, which is validated by human studies where judges showed clear preference for our method over competitive baselines.

Recent advances in text autoencoders have significantly improved the quality of the latent space, which enables models to generate grammatical and consistent text from aggregated latent vectors. As a successful application of this property, unsupervised opinion summarization models generate a summary by decoding the aggregated latent vectors of inputs. More specifically, they perform the aggregation via simple average. However, little is known about how the vector aggregation step affects the generation quality. In this study, we revisit the commonly used simple average approach by examining the latent space and generated summaries. We found that text autoencoders tend to generate overly generic summaries from simply averaged latent vectors due to an unexpected L₂-norm shrinkage in the aggregated latent vectors, which we refer to as summary vector degeneration. To overcome this issue, we develop a framework Coop, which searches input combinations for the latent vector aggregation using input-output word overlap. Experimental results show that Coop successfully alleviates the summary vector degeneration issue and establishes new state-of-the-art performance on two opinion summarization benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/coop.

We present OpinionDigest, an abstractive opinion summarization framework, which does not rely on gold-standard summaries for training. The framework uses an Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis model to extract opinion phrases from reviews, and trains a Transformer model to reconstruct the original reviews from these extractions. At summarization time, we merge extractions from multiple reviews and select the most popular ones. The selected opinions are used as input to the trained Transformer model, which verbalizes them into an opinion summary. OpinionDigest can also generate customized summaries, tailored to specific user needs, by filtering the selected opinions according to their aspect and/or sentiment. Automatic evaluation on Yelp data shows that our framework outperforms competitive baselines. Human studies on two corpora verify that OpinionDigest produces informative summaries and shows promising customization capabilities.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) extracts meaningful structured tuples from free-form text. Most previous work on OpenIE considers extracting data from one sentence at a time. We describe NeurON, a system for extracting tuples from question-answer pairs. One of the main motivations for NeurON is to be able to extend knowledge bases in a way that considers precisely the information that users care about. NeurON addresses several challenges. First, an answer text is often hard to understand without knowing the question, and second, relevant information can span multiple sentences. To address these, NeurON formulates extraction as a multi-source sequence-to-sequence learning task, wherein it combines distributed representations of a question and an answer to generate knowledge facts. We describe experiments on two real-world datasets that demonstrate that NeurON can find a significant number of new and interesting facts to extend a knowledge base compared to state-of-the-art OpenIE methods.