Overview of the PerAnsSumm 2025 Shared Task on Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization

AbstractThis paper presents an overview of the Perspective-aware Answer Summarization (PerAnsSumm) Shared Task on summarizing healthcare answers in Community Question Answering forums hosted at the CL4Health Workshop at NAACL 2025. In this shared task, we approach healthcare answer summarization with two subtasks: (a) perspective span identification and classification and (b) perspective-based answer summarization (summaries focused on one of the perspective classes). Wedefine a benchmarking setup for comprehensive evaluation of predicted spans and generated summaries. We encouraged participants to explore novel solutions to the proposed problem and received high interest in the task with 23 participating teams and 155 submissions. This paper describes the task objectives, the dataset, the evaluation metrics and our findings. We share the results of the novel approaches adopted by task participants, especially emphasizing the applicability of Large Language Models in this perspective-based answer summarization task.