# Indicative Summarization of Long Discussions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01882 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01882/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
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- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [Abstractive Text Summarization Using Sequence-to-Sequence RNNs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06023/) (2016)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01103/) (2016)
- [From Arguments to Key Points: Towards Automatic Argument Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01619/) (2020)
- [Classification and Clustering of Arguments with Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09821/) (2019)
- [Quantitative Argument Summarization and Beyond: Cross-Domain Key Point Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05369/) (2020)
- [Using Summarization to Discover Argument Facets in Online Ideological Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00662/) (2017)
- [Toward Extractive Summarization of Online Forum Discussions via Hierarchical Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10390/) (2018)
- [Spacerini: Plug-and-play Search Engines with Pyserini and Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14534/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online forums encourage the exchange and discussion of different stances on many topics. Not only do they provide an opportunity to present one's own arguments, but may also gather a broad cross-section of others' arguments. However, the resulting long discussions are difficult to overview. This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach using large language models (LLMs) to generating indicative summaries for long discussions that basically serve as tables of contents. Our approach first clusters argument sentences, generates cluster labels as abstractive summaries, and classifies the generated cluster labels into argumentation frames resulting in a two-level summary. Based on an extensively optimized prompt engineering approach, we evaluate 19~LLMs for generative cluster labeling and frame classification. To evaluate the usefulness of our indicative summaries, we conduct a purpose-driven user study via a new visual interface called Discussion Explorer: It shows that our proposed indicative summaries serve as a convenient navigation tool to explore long discussions.