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Clause-level Relationship-aware Math Word Problems Solver

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Abstract

Automatically solving math word problems, which involves comprehension, cognition, and reasoning, is a crucial issue in artificial intelligence research. Existing math word problem solvers mainly work on word-level relationship extraction and the generation of expression solutions while lacking consideration of the clause-level relationship. To this end, inspired by the theory of two levels of process in comprehension, we propose a novel clause-level relationship-aware math solver (CLRSolver) to mimic the process of human comprehension from lower level to higher level. Specifically, in the lower-level processes, we split problems into clauses according to their natural division and learn their semantics. In the higher-level processes, following human′s multi-view understanding of clause-level relationships, we first apply a CNN-based module to learn the dependency relationships between clauses from word relevance in a local view. Then, we propose two novel relationship-aware mechanisms to learn dependency relationships from the clause semantics in a global view. Next, we enhance the representation of clauses based on the learned clause-level dependency relationships. In expression generation, we develop a tree-based decoder to generate the mathematical expression. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets, where the results demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2021YFF090 1003), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61922073, U20A20229, and 62106244). The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Application, School of Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Chang-Yang Wu, Xin Lin, Zhen-Ya Huang, Yu Yin, Jia-Yu Liu & Qi Liu

  2. Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, 230088, China

    Qi Liu

  3. Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

    Gang Zhou

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  1. Chang-Yang Wu
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Correspondence to Qi Liu.

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Chang-Yang Wu received the B. A. degree in sport English from Shanghai University of Sport, China in 2014. Now, he is a master student in computer science at School of Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China.

His research interests include data mining and intelligent education systems.

Xin Lin received the B. Eng. degree in computer science from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2019. He is currently a Ph. D. degree candidate in computer science at School of Computer Science and Technology at USTC, China. He has published papers in referred conference proceedings, such as AAAI 2021.

His research interests include data mining, math word problems, intelligent education systems.

Zhen-Ya Huang received the B. Eng. degree in software engineering from Shandong University, China in 2014 and the Ph. D. degree in applied computer technology from University of Science and Technology of China, China in 2020. He is currently an associate researcher of School of Computer Science and Technology, USTC, China. He has published more than 30 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings including TKDE, TOIS, KDD, AAAI. He has served regularly in the program committees of a number of conferences, and is reviewer for the leading academic journals.

His research interests include data mining, knowledge discovery, representation learning and intelligent tutoring systems.

Yu Yin received the B. Sc. degree in computer science and technology from School of Computer Science and Technology, USTC, China in 2017. He is currently a Ph. D. degree candidate in computer science at School of Computer Science and Technology at USTC, China. He won the first prize in the Second Student Remote Direct Memory Access Programming Competition, in 2014. He has published papers in journals and conference proceedings related with data mining and machine learning, such as AAAI, KDD, ICDM, CIKM, SIGIR and ACM TKDE.

His research interests include data mining, intelligent education systems and reinforcement learning.

Jia-Yu Liu received the B.Sc. degree in applied mathematics from USTC, China in 2020. Now, he is a master student in data science (computer science and technology) at School of Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China.

His research interests include data mining and intelligent education systems.

Qi Liu received the Ph. D. degree in computer science from USTC, China in 2013. He is currently a professor at USTC, China. His general area of research is data mining and knowledge discovery. He has published prolifically in refereed journals and conference proceedings, e.g., the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the ACM Transactions on Information Systems, the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, ICDM, SDM, and CIKM. He has served regularly in the program committees of a number of conferences, and is a reviewer for the leading academic journals in his fields. He is a member of the ACM, the IEEE, and the Alibaba DAMO Academy Young Fellow. His research is also supported by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

His research interests include data science, data mining, machine learning: methods and applications, recommender systems, social network analysis.

Gang Zhou received the B. Eng. and M. A.Eng degrees in computer software from Information Engineering University, China in 1996 and 1999, the Ph. D. degree in computer software and theory from Beihang University, China in 2007. He was with the State key of Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering And Advanced Computing, Information Engineering University, as a research fellow.

His research interests are big data, knowledge graph, and data mining.

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Wu, CY., Lin, X., Huang, ZY. et al. Clause-level Relationship-aware Math Word Problems Solver. Mach. Intell. Res. 19, 425–438 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-022-1351-2

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