Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing

Ziqi Zhang, Philip Webster, Victoria Uren, Andrea Varga, Fabio Ciravegna


Abstract
Procedural knowledge is the knowledge required to perform certain tasks, and forms an important part of expertise. A major source of procedural knowledge is natural language instructions. While these readable instructions have been useful learning resources for human, they are not interpretable by machines. Automatically acquiring procedural knowledge in machine interpretable formats from instructions has become an increasingly popular research topic due to their potential applications in process automation. However, it has been insufficiently addressed. This paper presents an approach and an implemented system to assist users to automatically acquire procedural knowledge in structured forms from instructions. We introduce a generic semantic representation of procedures for analysing instructions, using which natural language techniques are applied to automatically extract structured procedures from instructions. The method is evaluated in three domains to justify the generality of the proposed semantic representation as well as the effectiveness of the implemented automatic system.
Anthology ID:
L12-1094
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
520–527
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/244_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ziqi Zhang, Philip Webster, Victoria Uren, Andrea Varga, and Fabio Ciravegna. 2012. Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 520–527, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Automatically Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Instructional Texts using Natural Language Processing (Zhang et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/244_Paper.pdf