Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Enabling computers to comprehend the intent of human actions by processing language is one of the fundamental goals of Natural Language Understanding. An emerging task in this context is that of free-form event process typing, which aims at understanding the overall goal of a protagonist in terms of an action and an object, given a sequence of events. This task was initially treated as a learning-to-rank problem by exploiting the similarity between processes and action/object textual definitions. However, this approach appears to be overly complex, binds the output types to a fixed inventory for possible word definitions and, moreover, leaves space for further enhancements as regards performance. In this paper, we advance the field by reformulating the free-form event process typing task as a sequence generation problem and put forward STEPS, an end-to-end approach for producing user intent in terms of actions and objects only, dispensing with the need for their definitions. In addition to this, we eliminate several dataset constraints set by previous works, while at the same time significantly outperforming them. We release the data and software at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/steps.