LLMs as Architects and Critics for Multi-Source Opinion Summarization
This work addresses the need for better-informed decision-making in product evaluation by enhancing opinion summarization with additional sources, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM capabilities.
The paper tackles the problem of multi-source opinion summarization by integrating product metadata with reviews to create comprehensive summaries, resulting in 87% user preference for these summaries over traditional ones and achieving a Spearman correlation of 0.74 with human judgment.
Multi-source Opinion Summarization (M-OS) extends beyond traditional opinion summarization by incorporating additional sources of product metadata such as descriptions, key features, specifications, and ratings, alongside reviews. This integration results in comprehensive summaries that capture both subjective opinions and objective product attributes essential for informed decision-making. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, their potential in M-OS remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the lack of evaluation datasets for this task has impeded further advancements. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-OS-EVAL, a benchmark dataset for evaluating multi-source opinion summaries across 7 key dimensions: fluency, coherence, relevance, faithfulness, aspect coverage, sentiment consistency, specificity. Our results demonstrate that M-OS significantly enhances user engagement, as evidenced by a user study in which, on average, 87% of participants preferred M-OS over opinion summaries. Our experiments demonstrate that factually enriched summaries enhance user engagement. Notably, M-OS-PROMPTS exhibit stronger alignment with human judgment, achieving an average Spearman correlation of \r{ho} = 0.74, which surpasses the performance of previous methodologies.