Towards generating math word problems from equations and topics

Abstract

A math word problem is a narrative with a specific topic that provides clues to the correct equation with numerical quantities and variables therein. In this paper, we focus on the task of generating math word problems. Previous works are mainly template-based with pre-defined rules. We propose a novel neural network model to generate math word problems from the given equations and topics. First, we design a fusion mechanism to incorporate the information of both equations and topics. Second, an entity-enforced loss is introduced to ensure the relevance between the generated math problem and the equation. Automatic evaluation results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the baseline models. In human evaluations, the math word problems generated by our model are rated as being more relevant (in terms of solvability of the given equations and relevance to topics) and natural (i.e., grammaticality, fluency) than the baseline models.