%0 Conference Proceedings %T Coalescing Global and Local Information for Procedural Text Understanding %A Ma, Kaixin %A Ilievski, Filip %A Francis, Jonathan %A Nyberg, Eric %A Oltramari, Alessandro %Y Calzolari, Nicoletta %Y Huang, Chu-Ren %Y Kim, Hansaem %Y Pustejovsky, James %Y Wanner, Leo %Y Choi, Key-Sun %Y Ryu, Pum-Mo %Y Chen, Hsin-Hsi %Y Donatelli, Lucia %Y Ji, Heng %Y Kurohashi, Sadao %Y Paggio, Patrizia %Y Xue, Nianwen %Y Kim, Seokhwan %Y Hahm, Younggyun %Y He, Zhong %Y Lee, Tony Kyungil %Y Santus, Enrico %Y Bond, Francis %Y Na, Seung-Hoon %S Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics %D 2022 %8 October %I International Committee on Computational Linguistics %C Gyeongju, Republic of Korea %F ma-etal-2022-coalescing %X Procedural text understanding is a challenging language reasoning task that requires models to track entity states across the development of a narrative. We identify three core aspects required for modeling this task, namely the local and global view of the inputs, as well as the global view of outputs. Prior methods have considered a subset of these aspects, which leads to either low precision or low recall. In this paper, we propose a new model Coalescing Global and Local Information (CGLI), which builds entity- and timestep-aware input representations (local input) considering the whole context (global input), and we jointly model the entity states with a structured prediction objective (global output). Thus, CGLI simultaneously optimizes for both precision and recall. Moreover, we extend CGLI with additional output layers and integrate it into a story reasoning framework. Extensive experiments on a popular procedural text understanding dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results, while experiments on a story reasoning benchmark show the positive impact of our model on downstream reasoning. %U https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.132 %P 1534-1545