Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem

Bin Wang, Jiangzhou Ju, Yang Fan, Xinyu Dai, Shujian Huang, Jiajun Chen


Abstract
As one of the challenging NLP tasks, designing math word problem (MWP) solvers has attracted increasing research attention for the past few years. In previous work, models designed by taking into account the properties of the binary tree structure of mathematical expressions at the output side have achieved better performance. However, the expressions corresponding to a MWP are often diverse (e.g., n1+n2 × n3-n4, n3× n2-n4+n1, etc.), and so are the corresponding binary trees, which creates difficulties in model learning due to the non-deterministic output space. In this paper, we propose the Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver (SUMC-Solver), which applies a tree with any M branches (M-tree) to unify the output structures. To learn the M-tree, we use a mapping to convert the M-tree into the M-tree codes, where codes store the information of the paths from tree root to leaf nodes and the information of leaf nodes themselves, and then devise a Sequence-to-Code (seq2code) model to generate the codes. Experimental results on the widely used MAWPS and Math23K datasets have demonstrated that SUMC-Solver not only outperforms several state-of-the-art models under similar experimental settings but also performs much better under low-resource conditions.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.556
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8122–8132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.556
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.556
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bin Wang, Jiangzhou Ju, Yang Fan, Xinyu Dai, Shujian Huang, and Jiajun Chen. 2022. Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8122–8132, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem (Wang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.556.pdf