What are they talking about? Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Discussion Summarization

In this work, we investigate the performance of LLMs on a new task that requires combining discussion with background knowledge for summarization. This aims to address the limitation of outside observer confusion in existing dialogue summarization systems due to their reliance solely on discussion information. To achieve this, we model the task output as background and opinion summaries and define two standardized summarization patterns. To support assessment, we introduce the first benchmark comprising high-quality samples consistently annotated by human experts and propose a novel hierarchical evaluation framework with fine-grained, interpretable metrics. We evaluate 12 LLMs under structured-prompt and self-reflection paradigms. Our findings reveal: (1) LLMs struggle with background summary retrieval, generation, and opinion summary integration. (2) Even top LLMs achieve less than 69% average performance across both patterns. (3) Current LLMs lack adequate self-evaluation and self-correction capabilities for this task.

@article{zhou2025_2505.12474,
  title={ What are they talking about? Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge-Grounded Discussion Summarization },
  author={ Weixiao Zhou and Junnan Zhu and Gengyao Li and Xianfu Cheng and Xinnian Liang and Feifei Zhai and Zhoujun Li },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12474},
  year={ 2025 }
}