Learning to Reason Deductively: Math Word Problem Solving as Complex Relation Extraction

Understand

Solving math word problems requires deductive reasoning over the quantities in the text.

• Various recent research efforts mostly relied on sequence-to-sequence or sequence-to-tree models to generate mathematical expressions without explicitly performing relational reasoning between quantities in the given context.
• While empirically effective, such approaches typically do not provide explanations for the generated expressions.
• In this work, we view the task as a complex relation extraction problem, proposing a novel approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions, where each step involves a primitive operation over two quantities defining their relation.