Solving General Arithmetic Word Problems

Understand

This paper presents a novel approach to automatically solving arithmetic word problems.

• This is the first algorithmic approach that can handle arithmetic problems with multiple steps and operations, without depending on additional annotations or predefined templates.
• We develop a theory for expression trees that can be used to represent and evaluate the target arithmetic expressions; we use it to uniquely decompose the target arithmetic problem to multiple classification problems; we then compose an expression tree, combining these with world knowledge through a constrained inference framework.
• Our classifiers gain from the use of {\em quantity schemas} that supports better extraction of features.