Compositional Mathematical Encoding for Math Word Problems

Abstract

Solving math word problem (MWP) remains a challenging task, as it requires to understand both the semantic meanings of the text and the mathematical logic among quantities, i.e., for both semantics modal and quantity modal learning. Current MWP encoders work in a uni-modal setting and map the given problem description to a latent representation, then for decoding. The generalizability of these MWP encoders is thus limited because some problems are semantics-demanding and others are quantity-demanding. To address this problem, we propose a Compositional Math Word Problem Solver (C-MWP) which works in a bimodal setting encoding in an interactive way. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of C-MWP and show its superiority over state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks.