A Meaning-based English Math Word Problem Solver with Understanding, Reasoning and Explanation

Chao-Chun Liang, Shih-Hong Tsai, Ting-Yun Chang, Yi-Chung Lin, Keh-Yih Su


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
C16-2032
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editor:
Hideo Watanabe
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
151–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-2032
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chao-Chun Liang, Shih-Hong Tsai, Ting-Yun Chang, Yi-Chung Lin, and Keh-Yih Su. 2016. A Meaning-based English Math Word Problem Solver with Understanding, Reasoning and Explanation. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 151–155, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
A Meaning-based English Math Word Problem Solver with Understanding, Reasoning and Explanation (Liang et al., COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-2032.pdf