What-if I ask you to explain: Explaining the effects of perturbations in procedural text

Abstract: We address the task of explaining the effects of perturbations in procedural text, an important test of process comprehension. Consider a passage describing a rabbit's life-cycle: humans can easily explain the effect on the rabbit population if a female rabbit becomes ill -- i.e., the female rabbit would not become pregnant, and as a result not have babies leading to a decrease in rabbit population. We present QUARTET, a system that constructs such explanations from paragraphs, by modeling the explanation task as a multitask learning problem. QUARTET provides better explanations (based on the sentences in the procedural text) compared to several strong baselines on a recent process comprehension benchmark. We also present a surprising secondary effect: our model also achieves a new SOTA with a 7% absolute F1 improvement on a downstream QA task. This illustrates that good explanations do not have to come at the expense of end task performance.