# Multi-Query Focused Disaster Summarization via Instruction-Based Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09008/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06713/) (2020)
- [Declarative Experimentation in Information Retrieval using PyTerrier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14271/) (2020)
- [Combining Deep Neural Reranking and Unsupervised Extraction for Multi-Query Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01148/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Harnessing Large Language Models for Disaster Management: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06932/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic summarization of mass-emergency events plays a critical role in disaster management. The second edition of CrisisFACTS aims to advance disaster summarization based on multi-stream fact-finding with a focus on web sources such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and Webnews. Here, participants are asked to develop systems that can extract key facts from several disaster-related events, which ultimately serve as a summary. This paper describes our method to tackle this challenging task. We follow previous work and propose to use a combination of retrieval, reranking, and an embarrassingly simple instruction-following summarization. The two-stage retrieval pipeline relies on BM25 and MonoT5, while the summarizer module is based on the open-source Large Language Model (LLM) LLaMA-13b. For summarization, we explore a Question Answering (QA)-motivated prompting approach and find the evidence useful for extracting query-relevant facts. The automatic metrics and human evaluation show strong results but also highlight the gap between open-source and proprietary systems.