In e-commerce, opinion summarization is the process of summarizing the consensus opinions found in product reviews. However, the potential of additional sources such as product description and question-answers (QA) has been considered less often. Moreover, the absence of any supervised training data makes this task challenging. To address this, we propose a novel synthetic dataset creation (SDC) strategy that leverages information from reviews as well as additional sources for selecting one of the reviews as a pseudo-summary to enable supervised training. Our Multi-Encoder Decoder framework for Opinion Summarization (MEDOS) employs a separate encoder for each source, enabling effective selection of information while generating the summary. For evaluation, due to the unavailability of test sets with additional sources, we extend the Amazon, Oposum+, and Flipkart test sets and leverage ChatGPT to annotate summaries. Experiments across nine test sets demonstrate that the combination of our SDC approach and MEDOS model achieves on average a 14.5% improvement in ROUGE-1 F1 over the SOTA. Moreover, comparative analysis underlines the significance of incorporating additional sources for generating more informative summaries. Human evaluations further indicate that MEDOS scores relatively higher in coherence and fluency with 0.41 and 0.5 (-1 to 1) respectively, compared to existing models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to generate opinion summaries leveraging additional sources in a self-supervised setting.

Redwood City, California-based Exo intends to integrate Medo's proprietary Sweep AI technology into its ultrasound platform to make the imaging modality more accessible to a wider range of caregivers. No financial terms for the acquisition were disclosed. According to a news release, Canada-based Medo's ultrasound AI technology radically lowers the expertise required to diagnose common and critical conditions through automated image acquisition and interpretation, giving non-experts the ability to conduct high-quality exams quickly and accurately. The company brings with it two FDA-cleared AI algorithms, as well as more in development, plus access to an extensive library of millions of ultrasound images and longitudinal health data to speed up point-of-care ultrasound adoption across the healthcare system, potentially expanding early disease detection and accelerating the path to treatment. Medo also holds strong partnerships across health systems worldwide, Exo said, including top institutions in Asia and Canada that can help to enable clinical validation and adoption.