Zero-Shot Opinion Summarization with GPT-3

Very large language models such as GPT-3 have shown impressive performance across a wide variety of tasks, including text summarization. In this paper, we show that this strong performance extends to opinion summarization. We explore several pipeline methods for applying GPT-3 to summarize a large collection of user reviews in a zero-shot fashion, notably approaches based on recursive summarization and selecting salient content to summarize through supervised clustering or extraction. On two datasets, an aspect-oriented summarization dataset of hotel reviews and a generic summarization dataset of Amazon and Yelp reviews, we show that the GPT-3 models achieve very strong performance in human evaluation. We argue that standard evaluation metrics do not reflect this, and evaluate against several new measures targeting faithfulness, factuality, and genericity to contrast these different methods.