Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving

Solving Mathematics Word Problem (MWP) is a basic ability of humanity, which can be mastered by most students at a young age. The existing artificial intelligence system is not good enough in numerical questions, like MWPs. The hard part of this problem is translating natural language sentences in M...

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Main Authors: Dong Liu, Guanfang Wang, Jialiang Yang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9942823/
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author Dong Liu
Guanfang Wang
Jialiang Yang
author_facet Dong Liu
Guanfang Wang
Jialiang Yang
author_sort Dong Liu
collection DOAJ
description Solving Mathematics Word Problem (MWP) is a basic ability of humanity, which can be mastered by most students at a young age. The existing artificial intelligence system is not good enough in numerical questions, like MWPs. The hard part of this problem is translating natural language sentences in MWP into mathematical expressions or equations. In recent researches, the Transformer network, which proved a great success in machine translation, is applied to automatic mathematic word problem-solving. While previous works have only shown the ability of Transformer model in MWP, how multiple factors such as encoding, decoding, and pre-training affect the performance of Transformer model has not received enough attention. The study is the first to examine the role of these factors experimentally. This paper proposes several methods to improve Transformer network performance in MWPs under the basis of previous studies, achieves higher accuracy compared to the previous state of the art. Pre-training on target tasks dataset improves the translation quality of the Transformer model greatly. Different token encoding and search algorithms also benefit prediction accuracy at the expense of more training and testing time.
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spelling doaj.art-cbbd3fc0ecdb40a6b27ec7061360344f2022-12-22T04:15:37ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362022-01-011012302012302710.1109/ACCESS.2022.32207779942823Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-SolvingDong Liu0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5740-8723Guanfang Wang1https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3825-6808Jialiang Yang2https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4689-8672Department of Information Technology, Luoyang Normal University, Luoyang, ChinaGeneis Beijing Company Ltd., Beijing, ChinaGeneis Beijing Company Ltd., Beijing, ChinaSolving Mathematics Word Problem (MWP) is a basic ability of humanity, which can be mastered by most students at a young age. The existing artificial intelligence system is not good enough in numerical questions, like MWPs. The hard part of this problem is translating natural language sentences in MWP into mathematical expressions or equations. In recent researches, the Transformer network, which proved a great success in machine translation, is applied to automatic mathematic word problem-solving. While previous works have only shown the ability of Transformer model in MWP, how multiple factors such as encoding, decoding, and pre-training affect the performance of Transformer model has not received enough attention. The study is the first to examine the role of these factors experimentally. This paper proposes several methods to improve Transformer network performance in MWPs under the basis of previous studies, achieves higher accuracy compared to the previous state of the art. Pre-training on target tasks dataset improves the translation quality of the Transformer model greatly. Different token encoding and search algorithms also benefit prediction accuracy at the expense of more training and testing time.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9942823/Machine translationmathematics word problemSeq2Seq modeltransformer
spellingShingle Dong Liu
Guanfang Wang
Jialiang Yang
Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
IEEE Access
Machine translation
mathematics word problem
Seq2Seq model
transformer
title Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
title_full Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
title_fullStr Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
title_full_unstemmed Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
title_short Help Transformer Improve Performance in Automatic Mathematics Word Problem-Solving
title_sort help transformer improve performance in automatic mathematics word problem solving
topic Machine translation
mathematics word problem
Seq2Seq model
transformer
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9942823/
work_keys_str_mv AT dongliu helptransformerimproveperformanceinautomaticmathematicswordproblemsolving
AT guanfangwang helptransformerimproveperformanceinautomaticmathematicswordproblemsolving
AT jialiangyang helptransformerimproveperformanceinautomaticmathematicswordproblemsolving