Enabling Interactive Answering of Procedural Questions

A mechanism to enable task oriented procedural question answering system for user assistance in English is presented in this paper. The primary aim is to create an answering “corpus” in a tree-form from unstructured document passages. This corpus is used to respond to the queries interactively to assist in completing a technical task. Reference manuals, documents or webpages are scraped to identify the sections depicting a “procedure” through machine learning techniques and then an integrated task tree with extracted procedural knowledge from text is generated. The automated mechanism breaks the procedural sections into steps, the appropriate “decision points” are identified, the interactive utterances are generated to gain user inputs and the alternative paths are created to complete the tree. Conventional tree traversal mechanism provides step by step guidance to complete a task. Efficacy of the proposed mechanism is tested on documents collected from three different domains and test results are presented.