Learning a Planning Domain Model From Natural Language Process Manuals

Artificial intelligence planning techniques have been widely used in many applications. A big challenge is to automate a planning model, especially for planning applications based on natural language (NL) input. This requires the analysis and understanding of NL text and a general learning technique does not exist in real-world applications. In this article, we investigate an intelligent planning technique for natural disaster management, e.g. typhoon contingency plan generation, through natural language process manuals. A planning model is to optimise management operations when a disaster occurs in a short time. Instead of manually building the planning model, we aim to automate the planning model generation by extracting disaster management-related content through NL processing (NLP) techniques. The learning input comes from the published documents that describe the operational process of preventing potential loss in the typhoon management. We adopt a classical planning model, namely planning domain definition language (PDDL), in the typhoon contingency plan generation. We propose a novel framework of FPTCP, which stands for a Framework of Planning Typhoon Contingency Plan, for learning a domain model of PDDL from NL text. We adapt NLP techniques to construct a ternary template of sentences of NL inputs from which actions and their objects are extracted to build a domain model. We also develop a comprehensive suite of user interaction components and facilitate the involvement of users in order to improve the learned domain models. The user interaction is to remove semantic duplicates of NL objects such that the users can select model-generated actions and predicates to better fit the PDDL domain model. We detail the implementation steps of the proposed FPTCP and evaluate its performance on real-world typhoon datasets. In addition, we compare FPTCP with two state-of-the-art approaches in applications of narrative generation, and discuss its capability and limitations.