AnswerSumm: A Manually-Curated Dataset and Pipeline for Answer Summarization

Community Question Answering (CQA) fora such as Stack Overflow and Yahoo! Answers contain a rich resource of answers to a wide range of community-based questions. Each question thread can receive a large number of answers with different perspectives. One goal of answer summarization is to produce a summary that reflects the range of answer perspectives. A major obstacle for abstractive answer summarization is the absence of a dataset to provide supervision for producing such summaries. Recent works propose heuristics to create such data, but these are often noisy and do not cover all perspectives present in the answers. This work introduces a novel dataset of 4,631 CQA threads for answer summarization, curated by professional linguists. Our pipeline gathers annotations for all subtasks involved in answer summarization, including the selection of answer sentences relevant to the question, grouping these sentences based on perspectives, summarizing each perspective, and producing an overall summary. We analyze and benchmark state-of-the-art models on these subtasks and introduce a novel unsupervised approach for multi-perspective data augmentation, that further boosts overall summarization performance according to automatic evaluation. Finally, we propose reinforcement learning rewards to improve factual consistency and answer coverage and analyze areas for improvement.