# Aspect-oriented Consumer Health Answer Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06295/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (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)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Zero-shot Text Classification: Datasets, Evaluation and Entailment Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00161/) (2019)
- [ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04063/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of ChatGPT for Query or Aspect-based Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08081/) (2023)
- [Optimizing the Factual Correctness of a Summary: A Study of Summarizing Radiology Reports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02541/) (2019)
- [MS2: Multi-Document Summarization of Medical Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06486/) (2021)
- [WikiAsp: A Dataset for Multi-domain Aspect-based Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07832/) (2020)
- [Generating (Factual?) Narrative Summaries of RCTs: Experiments with Neural Multi-Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11293/) (2020)
- [Question-Driven Summarization of Answers to Consumer Health Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09067/) (2020)
- [Ontology-Aware Clinical Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05818/) (2019)
- [Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00203/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Abstractive Question Summarization with Question-aware Semantic Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00176/) (2021)
- [CQASUMM: Building References for Community Question Answering Summarization Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04884/) (2018)
- [Neural Abstractive Summarization with Structural Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09739/) (2020)
- [Question-aware Transformer Models for Consumer Health Question Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00219/) (2021)
- [AnswerSumm: A Manually-Curated Dataset and Pipeline for Answer Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06474/) (2021)
- [Summarizing Community-based Question-Answer Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09892/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [No perspective, no perception!! Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08881/) (2024)
- [YaleNLP @ PerAnsSumm 2025: Multi-Perspective Integration via Mixture-of-Agents for Enhanced Healthcare QA Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03932/) (2025)
- [A Dataset and Benchmark for Consumer Healthcare Question Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23637/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Community Question-Answering (CQA) forums have revolutionized how people seek information, especially those related to their healthcare needs, placing their trust in the collective wisdom of the public. However, there can be several answers in response to a single query, which makes it hard to grasp the key information related to the specific health concern. Typically, CQA forums feature a single top-voted answer as a representative summary for each query. However, a single answer overlooks the alternative solutions and other information frequently offered in other responses. Our research focuses on aspect-based summarization of health answers to address this limitation. Summarization of responses under different aspects such as suggestions, information, personal experiences, and questions can enhance the usability of the platforms. We formalize a multi-stage annotation guideline and contribute a unique dataset comprising aspect-based human-written health answer summaries. We build an automated multi-faceted answer summarization pipeline with this dataset based on task-specific fine-tuning of several state-of-the-art models. The pipeline leverages question similarity to retrieve relevant answer sentences, subsequently classifying them into the appropriate aspect type. Following this, we employ several recent abstractive summarization models to generate aspect-based summaries. Finally, we present a comprehensive human analysis and find that our summaries rank high in capturing relevant content and a wide range of solutions.