The Role of Semantic Parsing in Understanding Procedural Text

In this paper, we investigate whether symbolic semantic representations, extracted from deep semantic parsers, can help reasoning over the states of involved entities in a procedural text. We consider a deep semantic parser~(TRIPS) and semantic role labeling as two sources of semantic parsing knowledge. First, we propose PROPOLIS, a symbolic parsing-based procedural reasoning framework. Second, we integrate semantic parsing information into state-of-the-art neural models to conduct procedural reasoning. Our experiments indicate that explicitly incorporating such semantic knowledge improves procedural understanding. This paper presents new metrics for evaluating procedural reasoning tasks that clarify the challenges and identify differences among neural, symbolic, and integrated models.Comment: 9 pages, Appected in EACL202

A taxonomy for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. We will present a taxonomy for interactive educational multimedia that supports the classification, description and development of such systems. Such a taxonomy needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A conceptual framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, describe them in the human-computer context, and integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction

The social cognition of medical knowledge, with special reference to childhood epilepsy

This paper arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analysed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The paper argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically, in terms of the knowledge which they produce, transmit and reproduce

A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia

Learning is more than knowledge acquisition; it often involves the active participation of the learner in a variety of knowledge- and skills-based learning and training activities. Interactive multimedia technology can support the variety of interaction channels and languages required to facilitate interactive learning and teaching. A conceptual architecture for interactive educational multimedia can support the development of such multimedia systems. Such an architecture needs to embed multimedia technology into a coherent educational context. A framework based on an integrated interaction model is needed to capture learning and training activities in an online setting from an educational perspective, to describe them in the human-computer context, and to integrate them with mechanisms and principles of multimedia interaction

Cognitive apprenticeship : teaching the craft of reading, writing, and mathtematics

Includes bibliographical references (p. 25-27)This research was supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract no. US-NIE-C-400-81-0030 and the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N00014-85-C-002

Reasoning over entity-action-location graph for procedural text understanding

Procedural text understanding aims at tracking the states (e.g., create, move, destroy) and locations of the entities mentioned in a given paragraph. To effectively track the states and locations, it is essential to capture the rich semantic relations between entities, actions, and locations in the paragraph. Although recent works have achieved substantial progress, most of them focus on leveraging the inherent constraints or incorporating external knowledge for state prediction. The rich semantic relations in the given paragraph are largely overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel approach (REAL) to procedural text understanding, where we build a general framework to systematically model the entity-entity, entity-action, and entity-location relations using a graph neural network. We further develop algorithms for graph construction, representation learning, and state and location tracking. We evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark datasets, ProPara, and Recipes. The experimental results show that our method outperforms strong baselines by a large margin, i.e., 5.0% on ProPara and 3.2% on Recipes, illustrating the utility of semantic relations and the effectiveness of the graph-based reasoning model

Interpretive Freedom: A Necessary Component of Article III Judging

As judges have debated the best method of constitutional and statutory interpretation, scholars have begun calling for increased constraints on the methodological freedoms of Article III judges. This Note rejects such proposals on constitutional grounds. Drawing upon the jurisprudence and scholarship on inherent powers, I argue that interpretive choice is an inherent judicial power. The drafting and ratification history of Article III demonstrates that the Framers expected federal judges to interpret the law. To accomplish this task, however, judges must have some methodological approach to help them prioritize interpretive evidence. Thus, imposition of a binding interpretive methodology upon federal judges would pose two constitutional problems. First, it would infringe the essential judicial function of interpretive deliberation. Second, it would prevent the judiciary as a whole from engaging in its most powerful constitutional check on the excesses of the political branches. Because interpretive freedom is necessary to the fulfillment of the Article III judicial function, that freedom must be considered an inherent power vested in all federal judges