@inproceedings{achkar-etal-2025-keyterms,
    title = "From Keyterms to Context: Exploring Topic Description Generation in Scientific Corpora",
    author = "Achkar, Pierre  and
      Murugaboopathy, Satiyabooshan  and
      Kreuter, Anne  and
      Gollub, Tim  and
      Potthast, Martin  and
      Campbell, Yuri",
    editor = "Dong, Yue  and
      Xiao, Wen  and
      Zhang, Haopeng  and
      Zhang, Rui  and
      Ernst, Ori  and
      Wang, Lu  and
      Liu, Fei",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of The 5th New Frontiers in Summarization Workshop",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Hybrid",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.newsum-main.8/",
    pages = "102--122",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-337-1",
    abstract = "Topic models represent topics as ranked term lists, which are often hard to interpret in scientific domains. We explore Topic Description for Scientific Corpora, an approach to generating structured summaries for topic-specific document sets. We propose and investigate two LLM-based pipelines: Selective Context Summarisation (SCS), which uses maximum marginal relevance to select representative documents; and Compressed Context Summarisation (CCS), a hierarchical approach that compresses document sets through iterative summarisation. We evaluate both methods using SUPERT and multi-model LLM-as-a-Judge across three topic modeling backbones and three scientific corpora. Our preliminary results suggest that SCS tends to outperform CCS in quality and robustness, while CCS shows potential advantages on larger topics. Our findings highlight interesting trade-offs between selective and compressed strategies for topic-level summarisation in scientific domains. We release code and data for two of the three datasets."
}