Learning by Analogy: Diverse Questions Generation in Math Word Problem

Zihao Zhou, Maizhen Ning, Qiufeng Wang, Jie Yao, Wei Wang, Xiaowei Huang, Kaizhu Huang


Abstract
Solving math word problem (MWP) with AI techniques has recently made great progress with the success of deep neural networks (DNN), but it is far from being solved. We argue that the ability of learning by analogy is essential for an MWP solver to better understand same problems which may typically be formulated in diverse ways. However most existing works exploit the shortcut learning to train MWP solvers simply based on samples with a single question. In lack of diverse questions, these methods merely learn shallow heuristics. In this paper, we make a first attempt to solve MWPs by generating diverse yet consistent questions/equations. Given a typical MWP including the scenario description, question, and equation (i.e., answer), we first generate multiple consistent equations via a group of heuristic rules. We then feed them to a question generator together with the scenario to obtain the corresponding diverse questions, forming a new MWP with a variety of questions and equations. Finally we engage a data filter to remove those unreasonable MWPs, keeping the high-quality augmented ones. To evaluate the ability of learning by analogy for an MWP solver, we generate a new MWP dataset (called DiverseMath23K) with diverse questions by extending the current benchmark Math23K. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can generate high-quality diverse questions with corresponding equations, further leading to performance improvement on Diverse-Math23K. The code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/zhouzihao501/DiverseMWP.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.705
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11091–11104
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.705
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.705
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zihao Zhou, Maizhen Ning, Qiufeng Wang, Jie Yao, Wei Wang, Xiaowei Huang, and Kaizhu Huang. 2023. Learning by Analogy: Diverse Questions Generation in Math Word Problem. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 11091–11104, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning by Analogy: Diverse Questions Generation in Math Word Problem (Zhou et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.705.pdf