%0 Conference Proceedings %T Program Induction by Rationale Generation: Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems %A Ling, Wang %A Yogatama, Dani %A Dyer, Chris %A Blunsom, Phil %Y Barzilay, Regina %Y Kan, Min-Yen %S Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) %D 2017 %8 July %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Vancouver, Canada %F ling-etal-2017-program %X Solving algebraic word problems requires executing a series of arithmetic operations—a program—to obtain a final answer. However, since programs can be arbitrarily complicated, inducing them directly from question-answer pairs is a formidable challenge. To make this task more feasible, we solve these problems by generating answer rationales, sequences of natural language and human-readable mathematical expressions that derive the final answer through a series of small steps. Although rationales do not explicitly specify programs, they provide a scaffolding for their structure via intermediate milestones. To evaluate our approach, we have created a new 100,000-sample dataset of questions, answers and rationales. Experimental results show that indirect supervision of program learning via answer rationales is a promising strategy for inducing arithmetic programs. %R 10.18653/v1/P17-1015 %U https://aclanthology.org/P17-1015 %U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1015 %P 158-167