@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-focus,
    title = "{FOCUS}: A Fine-Grained Customer-Oriented Sentiment Dialogue Summarization Dataset for {C}hinese Customer Service",
    author = "Chen, Qian  and
      Hu, Mengqiang  and
      Guo, Xin",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1141/",
    pages = "22744--22764",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Dialogue summarization (DS) plays a vital role in improving customer service efficiency by automatically generating concise summaries from lengthy multi-turn dialogues. However, existing studies largely overlook the fine-grained sentiment dynamics expressed by customers, and most DS datasets lack detailed sentiment annotations. These limitations hinder both accurate service quality assessment and the development of sentiment-aware summarization models. To address these challenges, we propose a three-stage approach to building an aspect-aware sentiment dataset, comprising: (1) aspect-anchored dialogue rewriting, (2) dialogue-anchored explainable label generation, and (3) label-dialogue integrated summarization. Building upon this scheme, we construct FOCUS, a $\textbf{F}$ine-grained customer-$\textbf{O}$riented $\textbf{C}$hinese dialog$\textbf{U}$e $\textbf{S}$ummarization dataset. FOCUS is the first Chinese dataset with 12,948 dialogues annotated for multi-level aspects, sentiment polarity, opinion content, emotions, as well as customer-oriented formatted and free-style sentiment summaries. To demonstrate the challenges and utility of FOCUS, we benchmark a range of summarization models on FOCUS and observe that current methods often exhibit misalignment between aspects and sentiments. Meanwhile, we find that a Chain-of-Thought approach can enhance faithfulness and interpretability, highlighting promising directions for future research on this dataset. FOCUS serves as a valuable resource to advance research in sentiment-aware DS and related tasks."
}