Process Extraction from Texts via Multi-Task Architecture

Process extraction, a recently emerged interdiscipline, aims to extract procedural knowledge expressed in texts. Previous process extractors heavily depend on domain-specific linguistic knowledge, thus suffer from the problems of poor quality and lack of adaptability. In this paper, we propose a multi-task architecture based model to perform process extraction. This is the first attempt that brings deep learning in process extraction. Specifically, we divide process extraction into three complete and independent subtasks: sentence classification, sentence semantic recognition and semantic role labeling. All of these subtasks are trained jointly, using a weight-sharing multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Moreover, instead of using fixed-size filters, we use multiscale convolutions to perceive more local contextual features. Finally, we propose a recurrent construction algorithm to create a graphical representation from the extracted procedural knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can extract more accurate procedural information than state-of-the-art baselines.