A Dataset for Tracking Entities in Open Domain Procedural Text

Niket Tandon, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Bhavana Dalvi, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Peter Clark, Michal Guerquin, Kyle Richardson, Eduard Hovy


Abstract
We present the first dataset for tracking state changes in procedural text from arbitrary domains by using an unrestricted (open) vocabulary. For example, in a text describing fog removal using potatoes, a car window may transition between being foggy, sticky, opaque, and clear. Previous formulations of this task provide the text and entities involved, and ask how those entities change for just a small, pre-defined set of attributes (e.g., location), limiting their fidelity. Our solution is a new task formulation where given just a procedural text as input, the task is to generate a set of state change tuples (entity, attribute, before-state, after-state) for each step, where the entity, attribute, and state values must be predicted from an open vocabulary. Using crowdsourcing, we create OPENPI, a high-quality (91.5% coverage as judged by humans and completely vetted), and large-scale dataset comprising 29,928 state changes over 4,050 sentences from 810 procedural real-world paragraphs from WikiHow.com. A current state-of-the-art generation model on this task achieves 16.1% F1 based on BLEU metric, leaving enough room for novel model architectures.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.520
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6408–6417
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.520
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.520
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Niket Tandon, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Bhavana Dalvi, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Peter Clark, Michal Guerquin, Kyle Richardson, and Eduard Hovy. 2020. A Dataset for Tracking Entities in Open Domain Procedural Text. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 6408–6417, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Dataset for Tracking Entities in Open Domain Procedural Text (Tandon et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.520.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939254
Data
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