Procedural text contains rich anaphoric phenomena, yet has not received much attention in NLP. To fill this gap, we investigate the textual properties of two types of procedural text, recipes and chemical patents, and generalize an anaphora annotation framework developed for the chemical domain for modeling anaphoric phenomena in recipes. We apply this framework to annotate the RecipeRef corpus with both bridging and coreference relations. Through comparison to chemical patents, we show the complexity of anaphora resolution in recipes. We demonstrate empirically that transfer learning from the chemical domain improves resolution of anaphora in recipes, suggesting transferability of general procedural knowledge.

In this paper, we investigate the utility of modern pretrained language models for the evidence grading system in the medical literature based on the ALTA 2021 shared task. We benchmark 1) domain-specific models that are optimized for medical literature and 2) domain-generic models with rich latent discourse representation (i.e. ELECTRA, RoBERTa). Our empirical experiments reveal that these modern pretrained language models suffer from high variance, and the ensemble method can improve the model performance. We found that ELECTRA performs best with an accuracy of 53.6% on the test set, outperforming domain-specific models.1

Chemical patents contain rich coreference and bridging links, which are the target of this research. Specially, we introduce a novel annotation scheme, based on which we create the ChEMU-Ref dataset from reaction description snippets in English-language chemical patents. We propose a neural approach to anaphora resolution, which we show to achieve strong results, especially when jointly trained over coreference and bridging links.