Show Me More Details: Discovering Hierarchies of Procedures from Semi-structured Web Data

Abstract

Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To make videos, one may need to purchase a camera, which in turn may require one to set a budget. While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., purchase a camera) in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., how to choose a camera), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval.