Using Intermediate Representations to Solve Math Word Problems

Danqing Huang, Jin-Ge Yao, Chin-Yew Lin, Qingyu Zhou, Jian Yin


Abstract
To solve math word problems, previous statistical approaches attempt at learning a direct mapping from a problem description to its corresponding equation system. However, such mappings do not include the information of a few higher-order operations that cannot be explicitly represented in equations but are required to solve the problem. The gap between natural language and equations makes it difficult for a learned model to generalize from limited data. In this work we present an intermediate meaning representation scheme that tries to reduce this gap. We use a sequence-to-sequence model with a novel attention regularization term to generate the intermediate forms, then execute them to obtain the final answers. Since the intermediate forms are latent, we propose an iterative labeling framework for learning by leveraging supervision signals from both equations and answers. Our experiments show using intermediate forms outperforms directly predicting equations.
Anthology ID:
P18-1039
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
419–428
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1039
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1039
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Danqing Huang, Jin-Ge Yao, Chin-Yew Lin, Qingyu Zhou, and Jian Yin. 2018. Using Intermediate Representations to Solve Math Word Problems. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 419–428, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using Intermediate Representations to Solve Math Word Problems (Huang et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1039.pdf
Note:
 P18-1039.Notes.pdf
Poster:
 P18-1039.Poster.pdf