Everything Happens for a Reason: Discovering the Purpose of Actions in Procedural Text

Bhavana Dalvi, Niket Tandon, Antoine Bosselut, Wen-tau Yih, Peter Clark

Abstract
Our goal is to better comprehend procedural text, e.g., a paragraph about photosynthesis, by not only predicting what happens, but *why* some actions need to happen before others. Our approach builds on a prior process comprehension framework for predicting actions’ effects, to also identify subsequent steps that those effects enable. We present our new model (XPAD) that biases effect predictions towards those that (1) explain more of the actions in the paragraph and (2) are more plausible with respect to background knowledge. We also extend an existing benchmark dataset for procedural text comprehension, ProPara, by adding the new task of explaining actions by predicting their dependencies. We find that XPAD significantly outperforms prior systems on this task, while maintaining the performance on the original task in ProPara. The dataset is available at http://data.allenai.org/propara
Anthology ID:
D19-1457
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4496–4505
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1457
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1457
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bhavana Dalvi, Niket Tandon, Antoine Bosselut, Wen-tau Yih, and Peter Clark. 2019. Everything Happens for a Reason: Discovering the Purpose of Actions in Procedural Text. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4496–4505, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Everything Happens for a Reason: Discovering the Purpose of Actions in Procedural Text (Dalvi et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/D19-1457.pdf
Data
ProPara
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