Information Types in Product Reviews

Information in text is communicated in a way that supports a goal for its reader. Product reviews, for example, contain opinions, tips, product descriptions, and many other types of information that provide both direct insights, as well as unexpected signals for downstream applications. We devise a typology of 24 communicative goals in sentences from the product review domain, and employ a zero-shot multi-label classifier that facilitates large-scale analyses of review data. In our experiments, we find that the combination of classes in the typology forecasts helpfulness and sentiment of reviews, while supplying explanations for these decisions. In addition, our typology enables analysis of review intent, effectiveness and rhetorical structure. Characterizing the types of information in reviews unlocks many opportunities for more effective consumption of this genre.

Measuring the Effect of Transcription Noise on Downstream Language Understanding Tasks

With the increasing prevalence of recorded human speech, spoken language understanding (SLU) is essential for its efficient processing. In order to process the speech, it is commonly transcribed using automatic speech recognition technology. This speech-to-text transition introduces errors into the transcripts, which subsequently propagate to downstream NLP tasks, such as dialogue summarization. While it is known that transcript noise affects downstream tasks, a systematic approach to analyzing its effects across different noise severities and types has not been addressed. We propose a configurable framework for assessing task models in diverse noisy settings, and for examining the impact of transcript-cleaning techniques. The framework facilitates the investigation of task model behavior, which can in turn support the development of effective SLU solutions. We exemplify the utility of our framework on three SLU tasks and four task models, offering insights regarding the effect of transcript noise on tasks in general and models in particular. For instance, we find that task models can tolerate a certain level of noise, and are affected differently by the types of errors in the transcript.

Quality Matters: Evaluating Synthetic Data for Tool-Using LLMs

Training large language models (LLMs) for external tool usage is a rapidly expanding field, with recent research focusing on generating synthetic data to address the shortage of available data. However, the absence of systematic data quality checks poses complications for properly training and testing models. To that end, we propose two approaches for assessing the reliability of data for training LLMs to use external tools. The first approach uses intuitive, human-defined correctness criteria. The second approach uses a model-driven assessment with in-context evaluation. We conduct a thorough evaluation of data quality on two popular benchmarks, followed by an extrinsic evaluation that showcases the impact of data quality on model performance. Our results demonstrate that models trained on high-quality data outperform those trained on unvalidated data, even when trained with a smaller quantity of data. These findings empirically support the significance of assessing and ensuring the reliability of training data for tool-using LLMs.

SEAM: A Stochastic Benchmark for Multi-Document Tasks

Various tasks, such as summarization, multi-hop question answering, or coreference resolution, are naturally phrased over collections of real-world documents. Such tasks present a unique set of challenges, revolving around the lack of coherent narrative structure across documents, which often leads to contradiction, omission, or repetition of information. Despite their real-world application and challenging properties, there is currently no benchmark which specifically measures the abilities of large language models (LLMs) on multi-document tasks. To bridge this gap, we present SEAM (a Stochastic Evaluation Approach for Multi-document tasks), a conglomerate benchmark over a diverse set of multi-document datasets, setting conventional evaluation criteria, input-output formats, and evaluation protocols. In particular, SEAM addresses the sensitivity of LLMs to minor prompt variations through repeated evaluations, where in each evaluation we sample uniformly at random the values of arbitrary factors (e.g., the order of documents). We evaluate different LLMs on SEAM finding that multi-document tasks pose a significant challenge for LLMs, even for state-of-the-art models with 70B parameters. In addition, we show that the stochastic approach uncovers underlying statistical trends which cannot be observed in a static benchmark. We hope that SEAM will spur progress via consistent and meaningful evaluation of multi-document tasks.

The Power of Summary-Source Alignments

Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a challenging task, often decomposed to subtasks of salience and redundancy detection, followed by text generation. In this context, alignment of corresponding sentences between a reference summary and its source documents has been leveraged to generate training data for some of the component tasks. Yet, this enabling alignment step has usually been applied heuristically on the sentence level on a limited number of subtasks. In this paper, we propose extending the summary-source alignment framework by (1) applying it at the more fine-grained proposition span level, (2) annotating alignment manually in a multi-document setup, and (3) revealing the great potential of summary-source alignments to yield several datasets for at least six different tasks. Specifically, for each of the tasks, we release a manually annotated test set that was derived automatically from the alignment annotation. We also release development and train sets in the same way, but from automatically derived alignments. Using the datasets, each task is demonstrated with baseline models and corresponding evaluation metrics to spur future research on this broad challenge.

Multi-Review Fusion-in-Context

Grounded text generation, encompassing tasks such as long-form question-answering and summarization, necessitates both content selection and content consolidation. Current end-to-end methods are difficult to control and interpret due to their opaqueness. Accordingly, recent works have proposed a modular approach, with separate components for each step. Specifically, we focus on the second subtask, of generating coherent text given pre-selected content in a multi-document setting. Concretely, we formalize Fusion-in-Context (FiC) as a standalone task, whose input consists of source texts with highlighted spans of targeted content. A model then needs to generate a coherent passage that includes all and only the target information. Our work includes the development of a curated dataset of 1000 instances in the reviews domain, alongside a novel evaluation framework for assessing the faithfulness and coverage of highlights, which strongly correlate to human judgment. Several baseline models exhibit promising outcomes and provide insightful analyses. This study lays the groundwork for further exploration of modular text generation in the multi-document setting, offering potential improvements in the quality and reliability of generated content. Our benchmark, FuseReviews, including the dataset, evaluation framework, and designated leaderboard, can be found at https://fusereviews.github.io/.

OpenAsp: A Benchmark for Multi-document Open Aspect-based Summarization

The performance of automatic summarization models has improved dramatically in recent years. Yet, there is still a gap in meeting specific information needs of users in real-world scenarios, particularly when a targeted summary is sought, such as in the useful aspect-based summarization setting targeted in this paper. Previous datasets and studies for this setting have predominantly concentrated on a limited set of pre-defined aspects, focused solely on single document inputs, or relied on synthetic data. To advance research on more realistic scenarios, we introduce OpenAsp, a benchmark for multi-document \textit{open} aspect-based summarization. This benchmark is created using a novel and cost-effective annotation protocol, by which an open aspect dataset is derived from existing generic multi-document summarization datasets. We analyze the properties of OpenAsp showcasing its high-quality content. Further, we show that the realistic open-aspect setting realized in OpenAsp poses a challenge for current state-of-the-art summarization models, as well as for large language models.

SummHelper: Collaborative Human-Computer Summarization

Current approaches for text summarization are predominantly automatic, with rather limited space for human intervention and control over the process. In this paper, we introduce SummHelper, a 2-phase summarization assistant designed to foster human-machine collaboration. The initial phase involves content selection, where the system recommends potential content, allowing users to accept, modify, or introduce additional selections. The subsequent phase, content consolidation, involves SummHelper generating a coherent summary from these selections, which users can then refine using visual mappings between the summary and the source text. Small-scale user studies reveal the effectiveness of our application, with participants being especially appreciative of the balance between automated guidance and opportunities for personal input.

A Proposition-Level Clustering Approach for Multi-Document Summarization

Text clustering methods were traditionally incorporated into multi-document summarization (MDS) as a means for coping with considerable information repetition. Clusters were leveraged to indicate information saliency and to avoid redundancy. These methods focused on clustering sentences, even though closely related sentences also usually contain non-aligning information. In this work, we revisit the clustering approach, grouping together propositions for more precise information alignment. Specifically, our method detects salient propositions, clusters them into paraphrastic clusters, and generates a representative sentence for each cluster by fusing its propositions. Our summarization method improves over the previous state-of-the-art MDS method in the DUC 2004 and TAC 2011 datasets, both in automatic ROUGE scores and human preference.

Multi-Document Keyphrase Extraction: A Literature Review and the First Dataset

Keyphrase extraction has been comprehensively researched within the single-document setting, with an abundance of methods and a wealth of datasets. In contrast, multi-document keyphrase extraction has been infrequently studied, despite its utility for describing sets of documents, and its use in summarization. Moreover, no dataset existed for multi-document keyphrase extraction, hindering the progress of the task. Recent advances in multi-text processing make the task an even more appealing challenge to pursue. To initiate this pursuit, we present here the first literature review and the first dataset for the task, MK-DUC-01, which can serve as a new benchmark. We test several keyphrase extraction baselines on our data and show their results.