# Sparse Graph Representations for Procedural Instructional Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03957/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03814/) (2017)
- [RecipeQA: A Challenge Dataset for Multimodal Comprehension of Cooking Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00812/) (2018)
- [Tracking State Changes in Procedural Text: A Challenge Dataset and Models for Process Paragraph Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06975/) (2018)
- [Variations of the Similarity Function of TextRank for Automated Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03606/) (2016)
- [Question Answering over Electronic Devices: A New Benchmark Dataset and a Multi-Task Learning based QA Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05897/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computation of document similarity is a critical task in various NLP domains that has applications in deduplication, matching, and recommendation. Traditional approaches for document similarity computation include learning representations of documents and employing a similarity or a distance function over the embeddings. However, pairwise similarities and differences are not efficiently captured by individual representations. Graph representations such as Joint Concept Interaction Graph (JCIG) represent a pair of documents as a joint undirected weighted graph. JCIGs facilitate an interpretable representation of document pairs as a graph. However, JCIGs are undirected, and don't consider the sequential flow of sentences in documents. We propose two approaches to model document similarity by representing document pairs as a directed and sparse JCIG that incorporates sequential information. We propose two algorithms inspired by Supergenome Sorting and Hamiltonian Path that replace the undirected edges with directed edges. Our approach also sparsifies the graph to O(n) edges from JCIG's worst case of O(n2). We show that our sparse directed graph model architecture consisting of a Siamese encoder and GCN achieves comparable results to the baseline on datasets not containing sequential information and beats the baseline by ten points on an instructional documents dataset containing sequential information.