Hey, posting our NAACL workshop paper (ESSP workshop).

In the course of working on it, I’ve been thinking a lot about “simulator” style environments for training NLP models. While there are many simulators for robot navigation and autonomous driving, there are hardly any for NLP. Seems to me there could be a lot of interesting potential there (would help in framing NLP problems as program induction, etc). If you have any thoughts on this or the paper, I’d be happy to hear!

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arXiv landing page

Understanding procedural text requires tracking entities, actions and effects as the narrative unfolds. We focus on the challenging real-world problem of action-graph extraction from material science papers, where language is highly specialized and data annotation is expensive and scarce. We propose a novel approach, Text2Quest, where procedural text is interpreted as instructions for an interactive game. A learning agent completes the game by executing the procedure correctly in a text-based simulated lab environment. The framework can complement existing approaches and enables richer forms of learning compared to static texts. We discuss potential limitations and advantages of the approach, and release a prototype proof-of-concept, hoping to encourage research in this direction.