Structural analysis of procedural texts for generating flow graphs

The volume of procedural texts, which describe the steps to reach a goal state, continue to increase. This paper proposes structural analysis methods for generating flow graphs from procedural texts. Examples of typical procedural texts include cooking texts, operation manuals for appliances/devices, and technical papers and patents that consist of methods or algorithms. The flow graphs of procedural texts allow the entire structure of a process to be grasped more simply and for differences or shared parts to be detected. To generate a flow graph, we developed a structure analysis method using a domain-specific dictionary. We apply our proposed methods to an actual recipe and a manual for a computer printer and discuss our result and remaining points.