AaKOS: Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization

Abstract

The rapid growth of information on the Internet has led to an overwhelming amount of opinions and comments on various activities, products, and services. This makes it difficult and time-consuming for users to process all the available information when making decisions. Text summarization, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task, has been widely explored to help users quickly retrieve relevant information by generating short and salient content from long or multiple documents. Recent advances in pre-trained language models, such as ChatGPT, have demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation. However, LLMs require massive amounts of data and resources and are challenging to implement as offline applications. Furthermore, existing text summarization approaches often lack the ``adaptive" nature required to capture diverse aspects in opinion summarization, which is particularly detrimental to users with specific requirements or preferences. In this paper, we propose an Aspect-adaptive Knowledge-based Opinion Summarization model for product reviews, which effectively captures the adaptive nature required for opinion summarization. The model generates aspect-oriented summaries given a set of reviews for a particular product, efficiently providing users with useful information on specific aspects they are interested in, ensuring the generated summaries are more personalized and informative. Extensive experiments have been conducted using real-world datasets to evaluate the proposed model. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and is adaptive and efficient in generating summaries that focus on particular aspects, enabling users to make well-informed decisions and catering to their diverse interests and preferences.