Procedures are inherently hierarchical. To “make videos”, one may need to “purchase a camera”, which in turn may require one to “set a budget”. While such hierarchical knowledge is critical for reasoning about complex procedures, most existing work has treated procedures as shallow structures without modeling the parent-child relation. In this work, we attempt to construct an open-domain hierarchical knowledge-base (KB) of procedures based on wikiHow, a website containing more than 110k instructional articles, each documenting the steps to carry out a complex procedure. To this end, we develop a simple and efficient method that links steps (e.g., “purchase a camera”) in an article to other articles with similar goals (e.g., “how to choose a camera”), recursively constructing the KB. Our method significantly outperforms several strong baselines according to automatic evaluation, human judgment, and application to downstream tasks such as instructional video retrieval.
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When parents and children disagree: Diving into DNS delegation inconsistency
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, decentralized, and distributed database. A key mechanism that enables the DNS to be hierarchical and distributed is delegation of responsibility from parent to child zones—typically managed by different entities. RFC1034 states that authoritative nameserver (NS) records at both parent and child should be "consistent and remain so", but we find inconsistencies for over 13M second-level domains. We classify the type of inconsistencies we observe, and the behavior of resolvers in the face of such inconsistencies, using RIPE Atlas to probe our experimental domain configured for different scenarios. Our results underline the risk such inconsistencies pose to the availability of misconfigured domains.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1724853
- PAR ID:
- 10186683
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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