Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data

Shuyan Zhou, Li Zhang, Yue Yang, Qing Lyu, Pengcheng Yin, Chris Callison-Burch, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To “make videos”, one may need to “purchase a camera”, which in turn may require one to “set a budget”. While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., “purchase a camera”) in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., “how to choose a camera”), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.214
Original:
2022.acl-long.214v1
Version 2:
2022.acl-long.214v2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2998–3012
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.214
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.214
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuyan Zhou, Li Zhang, Yue Yang, Qing Lyu, Pengcheng Yin, Chris Callison-Burch, and Graham Neubig. 2022. Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2998–3012, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data (Zhou et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.acl-long.214.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.214.software.zip
Code
 shuyanzhou/wikihow_hierarchy
Data
HowTo100M