Reasoning about Quantities in Natural Language

Subhro Roy, Tim Vieira, Dan Roth


Abstract
Little work from the Natural Language Processing community has targeted the role of quantities in Natural Language Understanding. This paper takes some key steps towards facilitating reasoning about quantities expressed in natural language. We investigate two different tasks of numerical reasoning. First, we consider Quantity Entailment, a new task formulated to understand the role of quantities in general textual inference tasks. Second, we consider the problem of automatically understanding and solving elementary school math word problems. In order to address these quantitative reasoning problems we first develop a computational approach which we show to successfully recognize and normalize textual expressions of quantities. We then use these capabilities to further develop algorithms to assist reasoning in the context of the aforementioned tasks.
Anthology ID:
Q15-1001
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 3
Month:
Year:
2015
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Michael Collins, Lillian Lee
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q15-1001
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00118
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Subhro Roy, Tim Vieira, and Dan Roth. 2015. Reasoning about Quantities in Natural Language. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 3:1–13.
Cite (Informal):
Reasoning about Quantities in Natural Language (Roy et al., TACL 2015)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q15-1001.pdf