ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts

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Main Authors: Olabisi, Olubusayo, Mitra, Ekata, Agrawal, Ameeta
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Olabisi, Olubusayo
Mitra, Ekata
Agrawal, Ameeta
author_facet Olabisi, Olubusayo
Mitra, Ekata
Agrawal, Ameeta
contents Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce ThreadSumm, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, ThreadSumm employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17648
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts
Olabisi, Olubusayo
Mitra, Ekata
Agrawal, Ameeta
Computation and Language
Summarizing deeply nested discussion threads requires handling interleaved replies, quotes, and overlapping topics, which standard LLM summarizers struggle to capture reliably. We introduce ThreadSumm, a multi-stage LLM framework that treats thread summarization as a hierarchical reasoning problem over explicit aspect and content unit representations. Our method first performs content planning via LLM-based extraction of discourse aspects and Atomic Content Units, then applies sentence ordering to construct thread-aware sequences that surface multiple viewpoints rather than a single linear strand. On top of these interpretable units, ThreadSumm employs a Tree of Thoughts search that generates and scores multiple paragraph candidates, jointly optimizing coherence and coverage within a unified search space. With this multi-proposal and iterative refinement design, we show improved performance in generating logically structured summaries compared to existing baselines, while achieving higher aspect retention and opinion coverage in nested discussions.
title ThreadSumm: Summarization of Nested Discourse Threads Using Tree of Thoughts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17648