Procedural Text Understanding

Procedural text understanding focuses on enabling computers to comprehend and reason about sequential instructions, such as recipes or scientific protocols, by tracking changes in entity states across steps. Current research emphasizes developing models that leverage the inherent order of instructions, often employing transformer-based architectures and pre-training strategies on large corpora, including those specifically designed for procedural knowledge extraction. This field is crucial for automating tasks like knowledge extraction from unstructured text, improving the reproducibility of scientific workflows, and facilitating more effective human-computer interaction in various domains. Advances in procedural text understanding have significant implications for knowledge engineering, biomedical research, and numerous other applications requiring the processing of step-by-step instructions.