Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding

Yu Zhou, Sha Li, Manling Li, Xudong Lin, Shih-Fu Chang, Mohit Bansal, Heng Ji


Abstract
Online resources such as WikiHow compile a wide range of scripts for performing everyday tasks, which can assist models in learning to reason about procedures. However, the scripts are always presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life. For example, in the CrossTask Dataset, 64.5% of consecutive step pairs are also observed in the reverse order, suggesting their ordering is not fixed. In addition, each step has an average of 2.56 frequent next steps, demonstrating “branching”. In this paper, we propose the new challenging task of non-sequential graph script induction, aiming to capture optional and interchangeable steps in procedural planning. To automate the induction of such graph scripts for given tasks, we propose to take advantage of loosely aligned videos of people performing the tasks. In particular, we design a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps and thus transform each video into an observed step path on the latent ground truth graph script. This key transformation enables us to train a script knowledge model capable of both generating explicit graph scripts for learnt tasks and predicting future steps given a partial step sequence. Our best model outperforms the strongest pure text/vision baselines by 17.52% absolute gains on F1@3 for next step prediction and 13.8% absolute gains on Acc@1 for partial sequence completion. Human evaluation shows our model outperforming the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% absolute gains in capturing sequential and non-sequential step relationships.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.303
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5529–5545
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.303
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.303
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Zhou, Sha Li, Manling Li, Xudong Lin, Shih-Fu Chang, Mohit Bansal, and Heng Ji. 2023. Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5529–5545, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding (Zhou et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.303.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.303.mp4