Papers › CQASUMM: Building References for Community Question Answering Summarization Corpora

CQASUMM: Building References for Community Question Answering Summarization Corpora

12 Nov 2018arXiv:1811.04884archive 2025-07-28

Tanya Chowdhury, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Community Question Answering forums such as Quora, Stackoverflow are rich knowledge resources, often catering to information on topics overlooked by major search engines. Answers submitted to these forums are often elaborated, contain spam, are marred by slurs and business promotions. It is difficult for a reader to go through numerous such answers to gauge community opinion. As a result summarization becomes a prioritized task for CQA forums. While a number of efforts have been made to summarize factoid CQA, little work exists in summarizing non-factoid CQA. We believe this is due to the lack of a considerably large, annotated dataset for CQA summarization. We create CQASUMM, the first huge annotated CQA summarization dataset by filtering the 4.4 million Yahoo! Answers L6 dataset. We sample threads where the best answer can double up as a reference summary and build hundred word summaries from them. We treat other answers as candidates documents for summarization. We provide a script to generate the dataset and introduce the new task of Community Question Answering Summarization. Multi document summarization has been widely studied with news article datasets, especially in the DUC and TAC challenges using news corpora. However documents in CQA have higher variance, contradicting opinion and lesser amount of overlap. We compare the popular multi document summarization techniques and evaluate their performance on our CQA corpora. We look into the state-of-the-art and understand the cases where existing multi document summarizers (MDS) fail. We find that most MDS workflows are built for the entirely factual news corpora, whereas our corpus has a fair share of opinion based instances too. We therefore introduce OpinioSumm, a new MDS which outperforms the best baseline by 4.6% w.r.t ROUGE-1 score.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

bitbucket.org/tanya14109/cqasumm officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Community Question AnsweringDocument SummarizationMulti-Document SummarizationQuestion Answering

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

CQASUMM

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections