TY - GEN
T1 - Learning to use formulas to solve simple arithmetic problems
AU - Mitra, Arindam
AU - Baral, Chitta
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank NSF for the DataNet Federation Consortium grant OCI-0940841 and ONR for their grant N00014-13-1-0334 for partially supporting this research.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Solving simple arithmetic word problems is one of the challenges in Natural Language Understanding. This paper presents a novel method to learn to use formulas to solve simple arithmetic word problems. Our system, analyzes each of the sentences to identify the variables and their attributes; and automatically maps this information into a higher level representation. It then uses that representation to recognize the presence of a formula along with its associated variables. An equation is then generated from the formal description of the formula. In the training phase, it learns to score the pair from the systematically generated higher level representation. It is able to solve 86.07% of the problems in a corpus of standard primary school test questions and beats the state-of-the-art by a margin of 8.07%.
AB - Solving simple arithmetic word problems is one of the challenges in Natural Language Understanding. This paper presents a novel method to learn to use formulas to solve simple arithmetic word problems. Our system, analyzes each of the sentences to identify the variables and their attributes; and automatically maps this information into a higher level representation. It then uses that representation to recognize the presence of a formula along with its associated variables. An equation is then generated from the formal description of the formula. In the training phase, it learns to score the pair from the systematically generated higher level representation. It is able to solve 86.07% of the problems in a corpus of standard primary school test questions and beats the state-of-the-art by a margin of 8.07%.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85012031741&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85012031741&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.18653/v1/p16-1202
DO - 10.18653/v1/p16-1202
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85012031741
T3 - 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016 - Long Papers
SP - 2144
EP - 2153
BT - 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016 - Long Papers
PB - Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
T2 - 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2016
Y2 - 7 August 2016 through 12 August 2016
ER -