Zero-shot Conversational Summarization Evaluations with small Large Language Models

Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Saurav Sahay, Sangeeta Manepalli, Lama Nachman

Keywords: conversation summarization, LLMs

TL;DR: Evaluation of LLMs on conversational summarization shows the need for better prompting to generate better summaries

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit powerful summarization abilities. However, their capabilities on conversational summarization remains under explored. In this work we evaluate LLMs (~10 billion parameters) on conversational summarization and showcase their performance on various prompts. We show that the summaries generated by models depend on the instructions and the performance of LLMs vary with different instructions sometimes resulting steep drop in ROUGE scores if prompts are not selected carefully. We also evaluate the models with human evaluations and discuss the limitations of the models on conversational summarization.

Submission Number: 74