The ability to sequence unordered events is an essential skill to comprehend and reason about real world task procedures, which often requires thorough understanding of temporal common sense and multimodal information, as these procedures are often communicated through a combination of texts and images. Such capability is essential for applications such as sequential task planning and multi-source instruction summarization. While humans are capable of reasoning about and sequencing unordered multimodal procedural instructions, whether current machine learning models have such essential capability is still an open question. In this work, we benchmark models' capability of reasoning over and sequencing unordered multimodal instructions by curating datasets from popular online instructional manuals and collecting comprehensive human annotations. We find models not only perform significantly worse than humans but also seem incapable of efficiently utilizing the multimodal information. To improve machines' performance on multimodal event sequencing, we propose sequentiality-aware pretraining techniques that exploit the sequential alignment properties of both texts and images, resulting in > 5% significant improvements.

We explore using a moderately sized large language model (GPT-J 6B parameters) to create a plan for a simulated robot to achieve 30 classes of goals in ScienceWorld, a text game simulator for elementary science experiments. Previously published empirical work claimed that large language models (LLMs) are a poor fit (Wang et al., 2022) compared to reinforcement learning. Using the Markov assumption (a single previous step), the LLM outperforms the reinforcement learning-based approach by a factor of 1.4. When we fill the LLM's input buffer with as many prior steps as possible, improvement rises to 3.5x. Even when training on only 6.5% of the training data, we observe a 2.2x improvement over the reinforcement-learning-based approach. Our experiments show that performance varies widely across the 30 classes of actions, indicating that averaging over tasks can hide significant performance issues. In work contemporaneous with ours, Lin et al. (2023) demonstrated a two-part approach (SwiftSage) that uses a small LLM (T5-large) complemented by OpenAI's massive LLMs to achieve outstanding results in ScienceWorld. Our 6-B parameter, single-stage GPT-J matches the performance of SwiftSage's two-stage architecture when it incorporates GPT-3.5 turbo which has 29-times more parameters than GPT-J.

Our goal is to deliver a new task and leaderboard to stimulate research on question answering and pre-trained language models (PTLMs) to understand a significant instructional document, e.g., an introductory college textbook or a manual. PTLMs have shown great success in many question-answering tasks, given significant supervised training, but much less so in zero-shot settings. We propose a new task that includes two college-level introductory texts in the social sciences (American Government 2e) and humanities (U.S. History), hundreds of true/false statements based on review questions written by the textbook authors, validation/development tests based on the first eight chapters of the textbooks, blind tests based on the remaining textbook chapters, and baseline results given state-of-the-art PTLMs. Since the questions are balanced, random performance should be ~50%. T5, fine-tuned with BoolQ achieves the same performance, suggesting that the textbook's content is not pre-represented in the PTLM. Taking the exam closed book, but having read the textbook (i.e., adding the textbook to T5's pre-training), yields at best minor improvement (56%), suggesting that the PTLM may not have "understood" the textbook (or perhaps misunderstood the questions). Performance is better (~60%) when the exam is taken open-book (i.e., allowing the machine to automatically retrieve a paragraph and use it to answer the question).

We describe Machine-Aided Script Curator (MASC), a system for human-machine collaborative script authoring. Scripts produced with MASC include (1) English descriptions of sub-events that comprise a larger, complex event; (2) event types for each of those events; (3) a record of entities expected to participate in multiple sub-events; and (4) temporal sequencing between the sub-events. MASC automates portions of the script creation process with suggestions for event types, links to Wikidata, and sub-events that may have been forgotten. We illustrate how these automations are useful to the script writer with a few case-study scripts.

We consider problems of making sequences of decisions to accomplish tasks, interacting via the medium of language. These problems are often tackled with reinforcement learning approaches. We find that these models do not generalize well when applied to novel task domains. However, the large amount of computation necessary to adequately train and explore the search space of sequential decision making, under a reinforcement learning paradigm, precludes the inclusion of large contextualized language models, which might otherwise enable the desired generalization ability. We introduce a teacher-student imitation learning methodology and a means of converting a reinforcement learning model into a natural language understanding model. Together, these methodologies enable the introduction of contextualized language models into the sequential decision making problem space. We show that models can learn faster and generalize more, leveraging both the imitation learning and the reformulation. Our models exceed teacher performance on various held-out decision problems, by up to 7% on in-domain problems and 24% on out-of-domain problems.

Long-form narrative text generated from large language models manages a fluent impersonation of human writing, but only at the local sentence level, and lacks structure or global cohesion. We posit that many of the problems of story generation can be addressed via high-quality content planning, and present a system that focuses on how to learn good plot structures to guide story generation. We utilize a plot-generation language model along with an ensemble of rescoring models that each implement an aspect of good story-writing as detailed in Aristotle's Poetics. We find that stories written with our more principled plot-structure are both more relevant to a given prompt and higher quality than baselines that do not content plan, or that plan in an unprincipled way.

This paper describes the Advanced Text Exploitation Assistant (ATEA), a system developed to enable intelligence analysts to perform link analysis and visualization (A&V) from information in large volumes of unstructured text. One of the key design challenges that had to be addressed was that of imperfect Information Extraction (IE) technology. While IE seems like a promising candidate for exploiting information in unstructured text, it makes mistakes. As a result, analysts do not trust its results. In this paper, we discuss how ATEA overcomes the obstacle of imperfect IE by incorporating a human-in-the-loop for review and correction of extraction results. We also discuss how coupling consolidated extraction results (corpus-level information objects) with an intuitive user interface facilitates interactive navigation of the resulting information. With these key features, ATEA enables effective link analysis and visualization of information in unstructured text.