Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xiong, Jing, Li, Chengming, Yang, Min, Hu, Xiping, Hu, Bin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Xiong, Jing
Li, Chengming
Yang, Min
Hu, Xiping
Hu, Bin
author_facet Xiong, Jing
Li, Chengming
Yang, Min
Hu, Xiping
Hu, Bin
contents Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available in https://github.com/menik1126/math_ESIB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_15664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems
Xiong, Jing
Li, Chengming
Yang, Min
Hu, Xiping
Hu, Bin
Computation and Language
Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available in https://github.com/menik1126/math_ESIB.
title Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15664