Reasoning about Procedures with Natural Language Processing: A Tutorial
It synthesizes existing knowledge for researchers in NLP, but is incremental as it does not introduce new methods or results.
This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of research on understanding procedures in natural language, covering collection methods, reasoning approaches, representations, and real-world applications.
This tutorial provides a comprehensive and in-depth view of the research on procedures, primarily in Natural Language Processing. A procedure is a sequence of steps intended to achieve some goal. Understanding procedures in natural language has a long history, with recent breakthroughs made possible by advances in technology. First, we discuss established approaches to collect procedures, by human annotation or extraction from web resources. Then, we examine different angles from which procedures can be reasoned about, as well as ways to represent them. Finally, we enumerate scenarios where procedural knowledge can be applied to the real world.