This paper presents a framework to answer the questions that require various kinds of inference mechanisms (such as Extraction, Entailment-Judgement, and Summarization). Most of the previous approaches adopt a rigid framework which handles only one inference mechanism. Only a few of them adopt several answer generation modules for providing different mechanisms; however, they either lack an aggregation mechanism to merge the answers from various modules, or are too complicated to be implemented with neural networks. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework, which consists of a set of various answer generation modules, a dispatch module, and an aggregation module. The answer generation modules are designed to provide different inference mechanisms, the dispatch module is used to select a few appropriate answer generation modules to generate answer candidates, and the aggregation module is employed to select the final answer. We test our framework on the 2020 Formosa Grand Challenge Contest dataset. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Roberta-large model by about 11.4%.

This paper presents a meaning-based statistical math word problem (MWP) solver with understanding, reasoning and explanation. It comprises a web user interface and pipelined modules for analysing the text, transforming both body and question parts into their logic forms, and then performing inference on them. The associated context of each quantity is represented with proposed role-tags (e.g., nsubj, verb, etc.), which provides the flexibility for annotating the extracted math quantity with its associated syntactic and semantic information (which specifies the physical meaning of that quantity). Those role-tags are then used to identify the desired operands and filter out irrelevant quantities (so that the answer can be obtained precisely). Since the physical meaning of each quantity is explicitly represented with those role-tags and used in the inference process, the proposed approach could explain how the answer is obtained in a human comprehensible way.