The Role of Semantic Parsing in Understanding Procedural Text

Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Choh Man Teng, James Allen

1st Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations (@ACL 2023) Long Paper

TLDR: In this paper, we investigate whether symbolic semantic representations, extracted from deep semantic parsers, can help to reason over the states of involved entities in a procedural text. We consider a deep semantic parser\textasciitilde{}(TRIPS) and semantic role labeling as two sources of semanti
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Abstract: In this paper, we investigate whether symbolic semantic representations, extracted from deep semantic parsers, can help to reason over the states of involved entities in a procedural text. We consider a deep semantic parser\textasciitilde{}(TRIPS) and semantic role labeling as two sources of semantic parsing knowledge. First, we propose PROPOLIS, a symbolic parsing-based procedural reasoning framework.Second, we integrate semantic parsing information into state-of-the-art neural models to conduct procedural reasoning.Our experiments indicate that explicitly incorporating such semantic knowledge improves procedural understanding. This paper presents new metrics for evaluating procedural reasoning tasks that clarify the challenges and identify differences among neural, symbolic, and integrated models.