Online forums encourage the exchange and discussion of different stances on many topics. Not only do they provide an opportunity to present one’s own arguments, but may also gather a broad cross-section of others’ arguments. However, the resulting long discussions are difficult to overview. This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach using large language models (LLMs) to generating indicative summaries for long discussions that basically serve as tables of contents. Our approach first clusters argument sentences, generates cluster labels as abstractive summaries, and classifies the generated cluster labels into argumentation frames resulting in a two-level summary. Based on an extensively optimized prompt engineering approach, we evaluate 19 LLMs for generative cluster labeling and frame classification. To evaluate the usefulness of our indicative summaries, we conduct a purpose-driven user study via a new visual interface called **Discussion Explorer**: It shows that our proposed indicative summaries serve as a convenient navigation tool to explore long discussions.

This paper presents Summary Workbench, a new tool for developing and evaluating text summarization models. New models and evaluation measures can be easily integrated as Docker-based plugins, allowing to examine the quality of their summaries against any input and to evaluate them using various evaluation measures. Visual analyses combining multiple measures provide insights into the models’ strengths and weaknesses. The tool is hosted at https://tldr.demo.webis.de and also supports local deployment for private resources.