What-if I ask you to explain: Explaining the effects of perturbations in procedural text

Understand

We address the task of explaining the effects of perturbations in procedural text, an important test of process comprehension.

• Consider a passage describing a rabbit's life-cycle: humans can easily explain the effect on the rabbit population if a female rabbit becomes ill -- i.e., the female rabbit would not become pregnant, and as a result not have babies leading to a decrease in rabbit population.
• We present QUARTET, a system that constructs such explanations from paragraphs, by modeling the explanation task as a multitask learning problem.
• QUARTET provides better explanations (based on the sentences in the procedural text) compared to several strong baselines on a recent process comprehension benchmark.