# Multi-Perspective Abstractive Answer Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08536 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08536/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Don't Give Me the Details, Just the Summary! Topic-Aware Convolutional Neural Networks for Extreme Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08745/) (2018)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12840/) (2019)
- [Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06732/) (2015)
- [ELI5: Long Form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09190/) (2019)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [Multi-News: a Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset and Abstractive Hierarchical Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01749/) (2019)
- [Asking and Answering Questions to Evaluate the Factual Consistency of Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04228/) (2020)
- [A Deep Reinforced Model for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04304/) (2017)
- [Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10198/) (2018)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [Fast Abstractive Summarization with Reinforce-Selected Sentence Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11080/) (2018)
- [Ranking Sentences for Extractive Summarization with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08636/) (2018)
- [Better Rewards Yield Better Summaries: Learning to Summarise Without References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01214/) (2019)
- [TANDA: Transfer and Adapt Pre-Trained Transformer Models for Answer Sentence Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04118/) (2019)
- [Multi-Reward Reinforced Summarization with Saliency and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06451/) (2018)
- [A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10070/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Graph-Augmented Abstractive Summarization with Semantic-Driven Cloze Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01159/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [No perspective, no perception!! Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08881/) (2024)
- [Answer Consolidation: Formulation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00042/) (2022)
- [AspirinSum: an Aspect-based utility-preserved de-identification Summarization framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13947/) (2024)
- [AutoJourn: Multi-Perspective Summarisation, Bias Detection and Bias Neutralisation for LLM-Generated News in Automated Journalism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18983/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Community Question Answering (CQA) forums such as Stack Overflow and Yahoo! Answers contain a rich resource of answers to a wide range of questions. Each question thread can receive a large number of answers with different perspectives. The goal of multi-perspective answer summarization is to produce a summary that includes all perspectives of the answer. A major obstacle for multi-perspective, abstractive answer summarization is the absence of a dataset to provide supervision for producing such summaries. This work introduces a novel dataset creation method to automatically create multi-perspective, bullet-point abstractive summaries from an existing CQA forum. Supervision provided by this dataset trains models to inherently produce multi-perspective summaries. Additionally, to train models to output more diverse, faithful answer summaries while retaining multiple perspectives, we propose a multi-reward optimization technique coupled with a sentence-relevance prediction multi-task loss. Our methods demonstrate improved coverage of perspectives and faithfulness as measured by automatic and human evaluations compared to a strong baseline.