Recovering Plans from the Web

Planning requires the careful and error-prone process of defining a domain model. This is usually performed by planning experts who should know about both the domain in hand, and the planning techniques (including sometimes the inners of these techniques or the tools that implement them). In order planning to be widely used this process should be performed by non-planning experts. On the other hand, in many domains there are plenty of electronic documents (including the Web) that describe processes or plans in a semi-structured way. These descriptions mix natural language and certain templates for that specific domain. One such examples is the www.WikiHow.com web site that includes plans in many domains, all plans described through a set of common templates. In this work, we present a suite of tools that automatically extract knowledge from those unstructured descriptions of plans to be used for diverse planning applications.