{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-to-decompose-and-organize-complex","title":"Learning to Decompose and Organize Complex Tasks","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-06-01","proceeding":"NAACL 2021 4","authors":["Yi Zhang","Sujay Kumar Jauhar","Julia Kiseleva","Ryen White","Dan Roth"],"abstract":"People rely on digital task management tools, such as email or to-do apps, to manage their tasks. Some of these tasks are large and complex, leading to action paralysis and feelings of being overwhelmed on the part of the user. The micro-productivity literature has shown that such tasks could benefit from being decomposed and organized, in order to reduce user cognitive load. Thus in this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end pipeline that consumes a complex task and induces a dependency graph from unstructured text to represent sub-tasks and their relationships. Our solution first finds nodes for sub-tasks from multiple {`}how-to{'} articles on the web by injecting a neural text generator with three key desiderata {--} relevance, abstraction, and consensus. Then we resolve and infer edges between these subtask nodes by learning task dependency relations. We collect a new dataset of complex tasks with their sub-task graph to develop and evaluate our solutions. Both components of our graph induction solution are evaluated in experiments, demonstrating that our models outperform a state-of-the-art text generator significantly. Our generalizable and scalable end-to-end solution has important implications for boosting user productivity and assisting with digital task management.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.217","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.217.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-to-decompose-and-organize-complex","repo_url":"https://github.com/microsoft/mscomplextasks","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"articles","task_name":"Articles"},{"task_slug":"management","task_name":"Management"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}