Teacher-Student Networks with Multiple Decoders for Solving Math Word Problem

Teacher-Student Networks with Multiple Decoders for Solving Math Word Problem

Jipeng Zhang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ee-Peng Lim, Wei Qin, Lei Wang, Jie Shao, Qianru Sun

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4011-4017. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/555

Math word problem (MWP) is challenging due to the limitation in training data where only one “standard” solution is available. MWP models often simply fit this solution rather than truly understand or solve the problem. The generalization of models (to diverse word scenarios) is thus limited. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach, TSN-MD, by leveraging the teacher network to integrate the knowledge of equivalent solution expressions and then to regularize the learning behavior of the student network. In addition, we introduce the multiple-decoder student network to generate multiple candidate solution expressions by which the final answer is voted. In experiments, we conduct extensive comparisons and ablative studies on two large-scale MWP benchmarks, and show that using TSN-MD can surpass the state-of-the-art works by a large margin. More intriguingly, the visualization results demonstrate that TSN-MD not only produces correct final answers but also generates diverse equivalent expressions of the solution.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Processing: Question Answering