Haotong Zhang


2022

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Summarizing Procedural Text: Data and Approach
Shen Gao | Haotong Zhang | Xiuying Chen | Rui Yan | Dongyan Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Procedural text is a widely used genre that contains many steps of instructions of how to cook a dish or how to conduct a chemical experiment and analyze the procedural text has become a popular task in the NLP field. Since the procedural text can be very long and contains many details, summarizing the whole procedural text or giving an overview for each complicated procedure step can save time for readers and help them to capture the core information in the text. In this paper, we propose the procedural text summarization task with two summarization granularity: step-view and global-view, which summarizes each step in the procedural text separately or gives an overall summary for all steps respectively. To tackle this task, we propose an Entity-State Graph-based Summarizer (ESGS) which is based on state-of-the-art entity state tracking methods and constructs a heterogeneous graph to aggregate contextual information for each procedure. In order to help the summarization model focus on the salient entities, we propose to use the contextualized procedure graph representation to predict the salient entities. Experiments conducted on two datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed model. Our code and datasets will be released on https://github.com/gsh199449/procedural-summ.