Q-STRUM Debate: Query-Driven Contrastive Summarization for Recommendation Comparison

George-Kirollos Saad, Scott Sanner


Abstract
Query-driven recommendation with unknown items poses a challenge for users to understand why certain items are appropriate for their needs. Query-driven Contrastive Summarization (QCS) is a methodology designed to address this issue by leveraging language-based item descriptions to clarify contrasts between them. However, existing state-of-the-art contrastive summarization methods such as STRUM-LLM fall short of this goal. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Q-STRUM Debate, a novel extension of STRUM-LLM that employs debate-style prompting to generate focused and contrastive summarizations of item aspects relevant to a query. Leveraging modern large language models (LLMs) as powerful tools for generating debates, Q-STRUM Debate provides enhanced contrastive summaries. Experiments across three datasets demonstrate that Q-STRUM Debate yields significant performance improvements over existing methods on key contrastive summarization criteria, thus introducing a novel and performant debate prompting methodology for QCS.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1170
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22765–22782
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1170/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1170
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
George-Kirollos Saad and Scott Sanner. 2025. Q-STRUM Debate: Query-Driven Contrastive Summarization for Recommendation Comparison. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 22765–22782, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Q-STRUM Debate: Query-Driven Contrastive Summarization for Recommendation Comparison (Saad & Sanner, Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1170.pdf