Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction
Arne Köhn, Julia Wichlacz, Álvaro Torralba, Daniel Höller, Jörg Hoffmann, Alexander Koller
Abstract
When generating technical instructions, it is often convenient to describe complex objects in the world at different levels of abstraction. A novice user might need an object explained piece by piece, while for an expert, talking about the complex object (e.g. a wall or railing) directly may be more succinct and efficient. We show how to generate building instructions at different levels of abstraction in Minecraft. We introduce the use of hierarchical planning to this end, a method from AI planning which can capture the structure of complex objects neatly. A crowdsourcing evaluation shows that the choice of abstraction level matters to users, and that an abstraction strategy which balances low-level and high-level object descriptions compares favorably to ones which don’t.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.coling-main.252
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Barcelona, Spain (Online)
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- International Committee on Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2802–2813
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.252
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.252
- Cite (ACL):
- Arne Köhn, Julia Wichlacz, Álvaro Torralba, Daniel Höller, Jörg Hoffmann, and Alexander Koller. 2020. Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2802–2813, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction (Köhn et al., COLING 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.coling-main.252.pdf