Large Scale Abstractive Multi-Review Summarization (LSARS) via Aspect Alignment

In an active e-commerce environment, customers process a large number of reviews when deciding on whether to buy a product or not. Abstractive Multi-Review Summarization aims to assist users to efficiently consume the reviews that are the most relevant to them. We propose the first large-scale abstractive multi-review summarization dataset that leverages more than 17.9 billion raw reviews and uses novel aspect-alignment techniques based on aspect annotations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that one can generate higher-quality review summaries by using a novel aspect-alignment-based model. Results from both automatic and human evaluation show that the proposed dataset plus the innovative aspect-alignment model can generate high-quality and trustful review summaries.