Mathematical Word Problem Generation from Commonsense Knowledge Graph and Equations

Tianqiao Liu, Qiang Fang, Wenbiao Ding, Hang Li, Zhongqin Wu, Zitao Liu


Abstract
There is an increasing interest in the use of mathematical word problem (MWP) generation in educational assessment. Different from standard natural question generation, MWP generation needs to maintain the underlying mathematical operations between quantities and variables, while at the same time ensuring the relevance between the output and the given topic. To address above problem, we develop an end-to-end neural model to generate diverse MWPs in real-world scenarios from commonsense knowledge graph and equations. The proposed model (1) learns both representations from edge-enhanced Levi graphs of symbolic equations and commonsense knowledge; (2) automatically fuses equation and commonsense knowledge information via a self-planning module when generating the MWPs. Experiments on an educational gold-standard set and a large-scale generated MWP set show that our approach is superior on the MWP generation task, and it outperforms the SOTA models in terms of both automatic evaluation metrics, i.e., BLEU-4, ROUGE-L, Self-BLEU, and human evaluation metrics, i.e., equation relevance, topic relevance, and language coherence. To encourage reproducible results, we make our code and MWP dataset public available at https://github.com/tal-ai/MaKE_EMNLP2021.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.348
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4225–4240
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.348
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.348
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianqiao Liu, Qiang Fang, Wenbiao Ding, Hang Li, Zhongqin Wu, and Zitao Liu. 2021. Mathematical Word Problem Generation from Commonsense Knowledge Graph and Equations. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4225–4240, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mathematical Word Problem Generation from Commonsense Knowledge Graph and Equations (Liu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.348.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.348.mp4
Code
 tal-ai/make_emnlp2021
Data
MAWPSMathQA