Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences

Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge


Abstract
We present a new problem: grounding natural language instructions to mobile user interface actions, and create three new datasets for it. For full task evaluation, we create PixelHelp, a corpus that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. To scale training, we decouple the language and action data by (a) annotating action phrase spans in How-To instructions and (b) synthesizing grounded descriptions of actions for mobile user interfaces. We use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instructions. A grounding Transformer then contextually represents UI objects using both their content and screen position and connects them to object descriptions. Given a starting screen and instruction, our model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PixelHelp.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.729
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8198–8210
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.729
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.729
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, and Jason Baldridge. 2020. Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 8198–8210, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences (Li et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.729.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929135
Code
 additional community code
Data
AndroidHowToPixelHelpRicoSCA