# Template-based Abstractive Microblog Opinion Summarisation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04083/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (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)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Text Summarization with Pretrained Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08345/) (2019)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (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)
- [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)
- [Extractive Summarization as Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08795/) (2020)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07100/) (2020)
- [Abstractive Summarization of Reddit Posts with Multi-level Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00783/) (2018)
- [Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Extractive Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12393/) (2020)
- [Best-Worst Scaling More Reliable than Rating Scales: A Case Study on Sentiment Intensity Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01765/) (2017)
- [Extractive Opinion Summarization in Quantized Transformer Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04443/) (2020)
- [Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08858/) (2018)
- [A Large-Scale Multi-Document Summarization Dataset from the Wikipedia Current Events Portal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10070/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Opinion Summarization as Copycat-Review Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02247/) (2019)
- [Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12836/) (2020)
- [Neural Network-Based Abstract Generation for Opinions and Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02785/) (2016)
- [Adapting the Neural Encoder-Decoder Framework from Single to Multi-Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06218/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Examining Bias in Opinion Summarisation Through the Perspective of Opinion Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04424/) (2023)
- [Bias in Opinion Summarisation from Pre-training to Adaptation: A Case Study in Political Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00322/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Opinion Summarisation in the Wasserstein Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14923/) (2022)
- [Less Is More? Examining Fairness in Pruned Large Language Models for Summarising Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17610/) (2025)
- [UniPoll: A Unified Social Media Poll Generation Framework via Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06851/) (2023)
- [Generating Zero-shot Abstractive Explanations for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12713/) (2024)
- [Coverage-based Fairness in Multi-document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08795/) (2024)
- [OPOR-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Online Public Opinion Report Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01896/) (2025)
- [The GDN-CC Dataset: Automatic Corpus Clarification for AI-enhanced Democratic Citizen Consultations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14944/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce the task of microblog opinion summarisation (MOS) and share a dataset of 3100 gold-standard opinion summaries to facilitate research in this domain. The dataset contains summaries of tweets spanning a 2-year period and covers more topics than any other public Twitter summarisation dataset. Summaries are abstractive in nature and have been created by journalists skilled in summarising news articles following a template separating factual information (main story) from author opinions. Our method differs from previous work on generating gold-standard summaries from social media, which usually involves selecting representative posts and thus favours extractive summarisation models. To showcase the dataset's utility and challenges, we benchmark a range of abstractive and extractive state-of-the-art summarisation models and achieve good performance, with the former outperforming the latter. We also show that fine-tuning is necessary to improve performance and investigate the benefits of using different sample sizes.