Understanding Procedural Text using Interactive Entity Networks

Jizhi Tang, Yansong Feng, Dongyan Zhao


Abstract
The task of procedural text comprehension aims to understand the dynamic nature of entities/objects in a process. Here, the key is to track how the entities interact with each other and how their states are changing along the procedure. Recent efforts have made great progress to track multiple entities in a procedural text, but usually treat each entity separately and ignore the fact that there are often multiple entities interacting with each other during one process, some of which are even explicitly mentioned. In this paper, we propose a novel Interactive Entity Network (IEN), which is a recurrent network with memory equipped cells for state tracking. In each IEN cell, we maintain different attention matrices through specific memories to model different types of entity interactions. Importantly, we can update these memories in a sequential manner so as to explore the causal relationship between entity actions and subsequent state changes. We evaluate our model on a benchmark dataset, and the results show that IEN outperforms state-of-the-art models by precisely capturing the interactions of multiple entities and explicitly leverage the relationship between entity interactions and subsequent state changes.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.591
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7281–7290
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.591
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.591
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jizhi Tang, Yansong Feng, and Dongyan Zhao. 2020. Understanding Procedural Text using Interactive Entity Networks. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 7281–7290, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding Procedural Text using Interactive Entity Networks (Tang et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.591.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938736