50 Ways to Bake a Cookie: Mapping the Landscape of Procedural Texts

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised method to summarize and visualize multiple procedural texts as an intuitive graph, aiding users in understanding and comparing different ways to accomplish a task, demonstrated on recipes.

Contribution

It presents a novel unsupervised approach for creating a graph-based summary of multiple procedural texts, enhancing user understanding and exploration.

Findings

User studies confirm the graph is intuitive and coherent.

The representation helps in adapting recipes for novices.

It enables discovering creative variations in procedures.

Abstract

The web is full of guidance on a wide variety of tasks, from changing the oil in your car to baking an apple pie. However, as content is created independently, a single task could have thousands of corresponding procedural texts. This makes it difficult for users to view the bigger picture and understand the multiple ways the task could be accomplished. In this work we propose an unsupervised learning approach for summarizing multiple procedural texts into an intuitive graph representation, allowing users to easily explore commonalities and differences. We demonstrate our approach on recipes, a prominent example of procedural texts. User studies show that our representation is intuitive and coherent and that it has the potential to help users with several sensemaking tasks, including adapting recipes for a novice cook and finding creative ways to spice up a dish.