Generating Adequate Instructions: Knowing When to Stop

Abstract

Adequate instructions are essential to the correct per-formance of actions. An instruction is adequate if its ac-tion(s) and objects are identified sufficiently and unam-biguously, given the instruction’s context. For instance, the instruction Turn the knob would be inadequate if, in the context, more than one knob or one way of turn-ing a knob were salient. However, even if the knob and the manner of turning were uniquely identifiable, the in-struction could still be inadequate since it does not tell the reader when to stop turning the knob. What is miss-ing here is the termination information for the action, or when the performance of the action is to end. Convey-ing such information in automated text generation is the focus of my research. I consider how to incorporate ter-mination information into an action representation and