Decomposed Opinion Summarization with Verified Aspect-Aware Modules

Miao Li, Jey Han Lau, Eduard Hovy, Mirella Lapata


Abstract
Opinion summarization plays a key role in deriving meaningful insights from large-scale online reviews. To make the process more explainable and grounded, we propose a domain-agnostic modular approach guided by review aspects (e.g., cleanliness for hotel reviews) which separates the tasks of aspect identification, opinion consolidation, and meta-review synthesis to enable greater transparency and ease of inspection. We conduct extensive experiments across datasets representing scientific research, business, and product domains. Results show that our approach generates more grounded summaries compared to strong baseline models, as verified through automated and human evaluations. Additionally, our modular approach, which incorporates reasoning based on review aspects, produces more informative intermediate outputs than other knowledge-agnostic decomposition approaches. Lastly, we provide empirical results to show that these intermediate outputs can support humans in summarizing opinions from large volumes of reviews.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1273
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
24805–24841
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1273/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miao Li, Jey Han Lau, Eduard Hovy, and Mirella Lapata. 2025. Decomposed Opinion Summarization with Verified Aspect-Aware Modules. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 24805–24841, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Decomposed Opinion Summarization with Verified Aspect-Aware Modules (Li et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1273.pdf