Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals
This work addresses complex question-answering in user manuals for customer service applications, representing an incremental advancement in the field.
The authors tackled the problem of machine reading comprehension of user manuals by introducing a new task requiring answers to factoid, procedure, and inconsistent questions, and they resolved it using a graph representation called TARA, which demonstrated effectiveness as a desired solution.
The machine reading comprehension (MRC) of user manuals has huge potential in customer service. However, current methods have trouble answering complex questions. Therefore, we introduce the Knowing-how & Knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style, and inconsistent questions about user manuals. We resolve this task by jointly representing the steps and facts in a graph TARA, which supports a unified inference of various questions. Towards a systematical benchmarking study, we design a heuristic method to automatically parse user manuals into TARAs and build an annotated dataset to test the model's ability in answering real-world questions. Empirical results demonstrate that representing user manuals as TARAs is a desired solution for the MRC of user manuals. An in-depth investigation of TARA further sheds light on the issues and broader impacts of future representations of user manuals. We hope our work can move the MRC of user manuals to a more complex and realistic stage.