Multi-Query Focused Disaster Summarization via Instruction-Based Prompting

Abstract: Automatic summarization of mass-emergency events plays a critical role in disaster management. The second edition of CrisisFACTS aims to advance disaster summarization based on multi-stream fact-finding with a focus on web sources such as Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and Webnews. Here, participants are asked to develop systems that can extract key facts from several disaster-related events, which ultimately serve as a summary. This paper describes our method to tackle this challenging task. We follow previous work and propose to use a combination of retrieval, reranking, and an embarrassingly simple instruction-following summarization. The two-stage retrieval pipeline relies on BM25 and MonoT5, while the summarizer module is based on the open-source LLM LLaMA-13b. For summarization, we explore a Question Answering (QA)-motivated prompting approach and find the evidence useful for extracting query-relevant facts. The automatic metrics and human evaluation show strong results but also highlight the gap between open-source and proprietary systems.