Sam Masling
2021
Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks
Nancy Xu
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Sam Masling
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Michael Du
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Giovanni Campagna
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Larry Heck
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James Landay
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Monica Lam
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to WebLang, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in the WebLang. RUSS may interact with the user through a dialogue (e.g. ask for an address) or execute a web operation (e.g. click a button) inside the web runtime. To augment training, we synthesize natural language instructions mapped to WebLang. Our dataset consists of 80 different customer service problems from help websites, with a total of 741 step-by-step instructions and their corresponding actions. RUSS achieves 76.7% end-to-end accuracy predicting agent actions from single instructions. It outperforms state-of-the-art models that directly map instructions to actions without WebLang. Our user study shows that RUSS is preferred by actual users over web navigation.
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Co-authors
- Nancy Xu 1
- Michael Du 1
- Giovanni Campagna 1
- Larry Heck 1
- James Landay 1
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