@inproceedings{qin-etal-2021-neural,
title = "Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks",
author = "Qin, Jinghui and
Liang, Xiaodan and
Hong, Yining and
Tang, Jianheng and
Lin, Liang",
editor = "Zong, Chengqing and
Xia, Fei and
Li, Wenjie and
Navigli, Roberto",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.456",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.456",
pages = "5870--5881",
abstract = "Previous math word problem solvers following the encoder-decoder paradigm fail to explicitly incorporate essential math symbolic constraints, leading to unexplainable and unreasonable predictions. Herein, we propose Neural-Symbolic Solver (NS-Solver) to explicitly and seamlessly incorporate different levels of symbolic constraints by auxiliary tasks. Our NS-Solver consists of a problem reader to encode problems, a programmer to generate symbolic equations, and a symbolic executor to obtain answers. Along with target expression supervision, our solver is also optimized via 4 new auxiliary objectives to enforce different symbolic reasoning: a) self-supervised number prediction task predicting both number quantity and number locations; b) commonsense constant prediction task predicting what prior knowledge (e.g. how many legs a chicken has) is required; c) program consistency checker computing the semantic loss between predicted equation and target equation to ensure reasonable equation mapping; d) duality exploiting task exploiting the quasi-duality between symbolic equation generation and problem{'}s part-of-speech generation to enhance the understanding ability of a solver. Besides, to provide a more realistic and challenging benchmark for developing a universal and scalable solver, we also construct a new largescale MWP benchmark CM17K consisting of 4 kinds of MWPs (arithmetic, one-unknown linear, one-unknown non-linear, equation set) with more than 17K samples. Extensive experiments on Math23K and our CM17k demonstrate the superiority of our NS-Solver compared to state-of-the-art methods.",
}
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<abstract>Previous math word problem solvers following the encoder-decoder paradigm fail to explicitly incorporate essential math symbolic constraints, leading to unexplainable and unreasonable predictions. Herein, we propose Neural-Symbolic Solver (NS-Solver) to explicitly and seamlessly incorporate different levels of symbolic constraints by auxiliary tasks. Our NS-Solver consists of a problem reader to encode problems, a programmer to generate symbolic equations, and a symbolic executor to obtain answers. Along with target expression supervision, our solver is also optimized via 4 new auxiliary objectives to enforce different symbolic reasoning: a) self-supervised number prediction task predicting both number quantity and number locations; b) commonsense constant prediction task predicting what prior knowledge (e.g. how many legs a chicken has) is required; c) program consistency checker computing the semantic loss between predicted equation and target equation to ensure reasonable equation mapping; d) duality exploiting task exploiting the quasi-duality between symbolic equation generation and problem’s part-of-speech generation to enhance the understanding ability of a solver. Besides, to provide a more realistic and challenging benchmark for developing a universal and scalable solver, we also construct a new largescale MWP benchmark CM17K consisting of 4 kinds of MWPs (arithmetic, one-unknown linear, one-unknown non-linear, equation set) with more than 17K samples. Extensive experiments on Math23K and our CM17k demonstrate the superiority of our NS-Solver compared to state-of-the-art methods.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks
%A Qin, Jinghui
%A Liang, Xiaodan
%A Hong, Yining
%A Tang, Jianheng
%A Lin, Liang
%Y Zong, Chengqing
%Y Xia, Fei
%Y Li, Wenjie
%Y Navigli, Roberto
%S Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2021
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Online
%F qin-etal-2021-neural
%X Previous math word problem solvers following the encoder-decoder paradigm fail to explicitly incorporate essential math symbolic constraints, leading to unexplainable and unreasonable predictions. Herein, we propose Neural-Symbolic Solver (NS-Solver) to explicitly and seamlessly incorporate different levels of symbolic constraints by auxiliary tasks. Our NS-Solver consists of a problem reader to encode problems, a programmer to generate symbolic equations, and a symbolic executor to obtain answers. Along with target expression supervision, our solver is also optimized via 4 new auxiliary objectives to enforce different symbolic reasoning: a) self-supervised number prediction task predicting both number quantity and number locations; b) commonsense constant prediction task predicting what prior knowledge (e.g. how many legs a chicken has) is required; c) program consistency checker computing the semantic loss between predicted equation and target equation to ensure reasonable equation mapping; d) duality exploiting task exploiting the quasi-duality between symbolic equation generation and problem’s part-of-speech generation to enhance the understanding ability of a solver. Besides, to provide a more realistic and challenging benchmark for developing a universal and scalable solver, we also construct a new largescale MWP benchmark CM17K consisting of 4 kinds of MWPs (arithmetic, one-unknown linear, one-unknown non-linear, equation set) with more than 17K samples. Extensive experiments on Math23K and our CM17k demonstrate the superiority of our NS-Solver compared to state-of-the-art methods.
%R 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.456
%U https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.456
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.456
%P 5870-5881
Markdown (Informal)
[Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks](https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.456) (Qin et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
ACL
- Jinghui Qin, Xiaodan Liang, Yining Hong, Jianheng Tang, and Liang Lin. 2021. Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5870–5881, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.