Unstructured Evidence Attribution for Long Context Query Focused
  Summarization
Authors: name: Dustin Wright; name: Zain Muhammad Mujahid; name: Lu Wang; name: Isabelle Augenstein; name: David Jurgens
Published: 2025-02-20 09:57:42

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating coherent summaries
from very long contexts given a user query. Extracting and properly citing
evidence spans could help improve the transparency and reliability of these
summaries. At the same time, LLMs suffer from positional biases in terms of
which information they understand and attend to, which could affect evidence
citation. Whereas previous work has focused on evidence citation with
predefined levels of granularity (e.g. sentence, paragraph, document, etc.), we
propose the task of long-context query focused summarization with unstructured
evidence citation. We show how existing systems struggle to generate and
properly cite unstructured evidence from their context, and that evidence tends
to be "lost-in-the-middle". To help mitigate this, we create the Summaries with
Unstructured Evidence Text dataset (SUnsET), a synthetic dataset generated
using a novel domain-agnostic pipeline which can be used as supervision to
adapt LLMs to this task. We demonstrate across 5 LLMs of different sizes and 4
datasets with varying document types and lengths that LLMs adapted with SUnsET
data generate more relevant and factually consistent evidence than their base
models, extract evidence from more diverse locations in their context, and can
generate more relevant and consistent summaries.