# Seeking Diverse Reasoning Logic: Controlled Equation Expression Generation for Solving Math Word Problems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10310 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10310/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [CTRLsum: Towards Generic Controllable Text Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04281/) (2020)
- [Generate & Rank: A Multi-task Framework for Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03034/) (2021)
- [Translating a Math Word Problem to an Expression Tree](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05632/) (2018)
- [Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01431/) (2021)
- [Semantically-Aligned Universal Tree-Structured Solver for Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06823/) (2020)
- [Seeking Patterns, Not just Memorizing Procedures: Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08464/) (2021)
- [Annotating Derivations: A New Evaluation Strategy and Dataset for Algebra Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07197/) (2016)
- [Investigating Math Word Problems using Pretrained Multilingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08928/) (2021)
- [Reverse Operation based Data Augmentation for Solving Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01556/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [An Expression Tree Decoding Strategy for Mathematical Equation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09619/) (2023)
- [ComSearch: Equation Searching with Combinatorial Strategy for Solving Math Word Problems with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07017/) (2022)
- [Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16022/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation. In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets.