Coling 2020: Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction
Channel: Arne Köhn
Date: 2020-11-30

Presentation for our paper "Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction" at COLING 2020.


Paper: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-main.252
PDF: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-main.252.pdf



Abstract:
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When generating technical instructions, it is often convenient to
describe complex objects in the world at different levels of
abstraction. A novice user might need an object explained piece by
piece, while for an expert, talking about the complex object (e.g.
a wall or railing) directly may be more succinct and efficient. We
show how to generate building instructions at different levels of
abstraction in Minecraft. We introduce the use of hierarchical
planning to this end, a method from AI planning which can capture
the structure of complex objects neatly. A crowdsourcing evaluation
shows that the choice of abstraction level matters to users, and
that an abstraction strategy which balances low-level and high-level
object descriptions compares favorably to ones which don't.