Recipe Instruction Semantics Corpus (RISeC): Resolving Semantic Structure and Zero Anaphora in Recipes

We propose a newly annotated dataset for information extraction on recipes. Unlike previous approaches to machine comprehension of procedural texts, we avoid a priori pre-defining domain-specific predicates to recognize (e.g., the primitive instructions in MILK) and focus on basic understanding of the expressed semantics rather than directly reduce them to a simplified state representation (e.g., ProPara). We thus frame the semantic comprehension of procedural text such as recipes, as fairly generic NLP subtasks, covering (i) entity recognition (ingredients, tools and actions), (ii) relation extraction (what ingredients and tools are involved in the actions), and (iii) zero anaphora resolution (link actions to implicit arguments, e.g., results from previous recipe steps). Further, our Recipe Instruction Semantic Corpus (RISeC) dataset includes textual descriptions for the zero anaphora, to facilitate language generation thereof. Besides the dataset itself, we contribute a pipeline neural architecture that addresses entity and relation extraction as well as identification of zero anaphora. These basic building blocks can facilitate more advanced downstream applications (e.g., question answering, conversational agents).