From Information to Insight: Leveraging LLMs for Open Aspect-Based Educational Summarization

Yang Zhong, Diane Litman


Abstract
This paper addresses the challenge of aspect-based summarization in education by introducing Reflective ASPect-based summarization (ReflectASP), a novel dataset that summarizes student reflections on STEM lectures. Despite the promising performance of large language models in general summarization, their application to nuanced aspect-based summaries remains under-explored. ReflectASP eases the exploration of open-aspect-based summarization (OABS), overcoming the limitations of current datasets and comes with ample human annotations. We benchmarked different types of zero-shot summarization methods and proposed two refinement methods to improve summaries, supported by both automatic and human manual evaluations. Additionally, we analyzed suggestions and revisions made during the refinement process, offering a fine-grained study of the editing strategies employed by these methods. We make our models, dataset, and all human evaluation results available at https://github.com/cs329yangzhong/ReflectASP.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.95
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1914–1947
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.95/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Zhong and Diane Litman. 2025. From Information to Insight: Leveraging LLMs for Open Aspect-Based Educational Summarization. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1914–1947, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Information to Insight: Leveraging LLMs for Open Aspect-Based Educational Summarization (Zhong & Litman, ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.95.pdf