MyFixit: An Annotated Dataset, Annotation Tool, and Baseline Methods for Information Extraction from Repair Manuals

Text instructions are among the most widely used media for learning and teaching. Hence, to create assistance systems that are capable of supporting humans autonomously in new tasks, it would be immensely productive, if machines were enabled to extract task knowledge from such text instructions. In this paper, we, therefore, focus on information extraction (IE) from the instructional text in repair manuals. This brings with it the multiple challenges of information extraction from the situated and technical language in relatively long and often complex instructions. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a semi-structured dataset of repair manuals. The dataset is annotated in a large category of devices, with information that we consider most valuable for an automated repair assistant, including the required tools and the disassembled parts at each step of the repair progress. We then propose methods that can serve as baselines for this IE task: an unsupervised method based on a bags-of-n-grams similarity for extracting the needed tools in each repair step, and a deep-learning-based sequence labeling model for extracting the identity of disassembled parts. These baseline methods are integrated into a semi-automatic web-based annotator application that is also available along with the dataset.