Overview of the PerAnsSumm 2025 Shared Task on Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization

Siddhant Agarwal, Md. Shad Akhtar, Shweta Yadav


Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the Perspective-aware Answer Summarization (PerAnsSumm) Shared Task on summarizing healthcare answers in Community Question Answering forums hosted at the CL4Health Workshop at NAACL 2025. In this shared task, we approach healthcare answer summarization with two subtasks: (a) perspective span identification and classification and (b) perspective-based answer summarization (summaries focused on one of the perspective classes). Wedefine a benchmarking setup for comprehensive evaluation of predicted spans and generated summaries. We encouraged participants to explore novel solutions to the proposed problem and received high interest in the task with 23 participating teams and 155 submissions. This paper describes the task objectives, the dataset, the evaluation metrics and our findings. We share the results of the novel approaches adopted by task participants, especially emphasizing the applicability of Large Language Models in this perspective-based answer summarization task.
Anthology ID:
2025.cl4health-1.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman, Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
445–455
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cl4health-1.41/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siddhant Agarwal, Md. Shad Akhtar, and Shweta Yadav. 2025. Overview of the PerAnsSumm 2025 Shared Task on Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health), pages 445–455, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Overview of the PerAnsSumm 2025 Shared Task on Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization (Agarwal et al., CL4Health 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cl4health-1.41.pdf