cs.CLJun 7, 2026

Segment-level Tree Search for Long Meeting Document Summarization

Authors: Sangwon RyuHeejin DoJun SeoDaehui KimYunsu KimGary Geunbae LeeJungseul Ok

Organizations: GSAI, POSTECH · ETH Zurich, ETH AI Center · Agentic AI Lab, KT · LILT · CSE, POSTECH

Abstract

Meeting documents are challenging to summarize due to their length and complex conversational structure. Existing approaches typically adopt multi-stage pipelines that extract information prior to summarization; however, these approaches often suffer from cumulative error propagation without intermediate validation, a limitation further amplified by short and low-quality reference summaries. We propose segment-level summarization via Monte Carlo Tree Search (S3), a training-free framework that constructs a final summary by composing segment-level summary candidates. S3 partitions a long document into segments and generates multiple summary candidates per segment, forming nodes of a search tree. The best-scoring combination is selected via self-reward-guided tree search and refined into the final output. Despite using a 7B model, S3 achieves performance comparable to larger 72B models while producing length-appropriate summaries.

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