Reasoning about Goals, Steps, and Temporal Ordering with WikiHow

Lyu, Qing; Zhang, Li; Callison-Burch, Chris

We propose a suite of reasoning tasks on two types of relations between procedural events: goal-step relations ("learn poses"is a step in the larger goal of"doing yoga") and step-step temporal relations ("buy a yoga mat"typically precedes"learn poses"). We introduce a dataset targeting these two relations based on wikiHow, a website of instructional how-to articles. Our human-validated test set serves as a reliable benchmark for commonsense inference, with a gap of about 10% to 20% between the performance of state-of-the-art transformer models and human performance. Our automatically-generated training set allows models to effectively transfer to out-of-domain tasks requiring knowledge of procedural events, with greatly improved performances on SWAG, Snips, and the Story Cloze Test in zero- and few-shot settings.