Extraction of Implicit Quantity Relations for Arithmetic Word Problems in Chinese

Abstract

The extraction of implicit quantity relations is one of critical steps of building the machine solver for solving arithmetic word problems. Extracting implicit quantity relations is a challenge research problem as partial problem of natural language understanding, which has no mature solution method. To address this challenge, the existing work in the extraction of quantity relations mainly relies on creating problem solving framework and extracting system of linear equations. However, these existing methods can solve the relatively simple problems due to they have no methods to extract implicit quality relations. This paper proposes a novel method for extracting implicit quantity relations, which is achieved by the process of Chinese phrase parse, classification and instantiation method of required general implicit quantity relations with semantic models. A set of experiments were conducted to classify the arithmetic word problems, and an example was taken to illustrate the proposed method of identifying general implicit quantity relations. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in extracting implicit quantity relations.