Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks

Nancy Xu, Sam Masling, Michael Du, Giovanni Campagna, Larry Heck, James Landay, Monica Lam


Abstract
Grounding natural language instructions on the web to perform previously unseen tasks enables accessibility and automation. We introduce a task and dataset to train AI agents from open-domain, step-by-step instructions originally written for people. We build RUSS (Rapid Universal Support Service) to tackle this problem. RUSS consists of two models: First, a BERT-LSTM with pointers parses instructions to WebLang, a domain-specific language we design for grounding natural language on the web. Then, a grounding model retrieves the unique IDs of any webpage elements requested in the WebLang. RUSS may interact with the user through a dialogue (e.g. ask for an address) or execute a web operation (e.g. click a button) inside the web runtime. To augment training, we synthesize natural language instructions mapped to WebLang. Our dataset consists of 80 different customer service problems from help websites, with a total of 741 step-by-step instructions and their corresponding actions. RUSS achieves 76.7% end-to-end accuracy predicting agent actions from single instructions. It outperforms state-of-the-art models that directly map instructions to actions without WebLang. Our user study shows that RUSS is preferred by actual users over web navigation.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.80
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1022–1032
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.80
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.80
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nancy Xu, Sam Masling, Michael Du, Giovanni Campagna, Larry Heck, James Landay, and Monica Lam. 2021. Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1022–1032, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grounding Open-Domain Instructions to Automate Web Support Tasks (Xu et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.80.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.80.mp4
Code
 xnancy/russ
Data
RUSS Dataset