YNU-HPCC at SemEval-2024 Task 7: Instruction Fine-tuning Models for Numerical Understanding and Generation

Kaiyuan Chen, Jin Wang, Xuejie Zhang

Abstract: This paper presents our systems for Task 7, Numeral-Aware Language Understanding and Generation of SemEval 2024. As participants of Task 7, we engage in all subtasks and implement corresponding systems for each subtask. All subtasks cover three aspects: Quantitative understanding (English), Reading Comprehension of the Numbers in the text (Chinese), and Numeral-Aware Headline Generation (English). Our approach explores employing instruction-tuned models (Flan-T5) or text-to-text models (T5) to accomplish the respective subtasks. We implement the instruction fine-tuning with or without demonstrations and employ similarity-based retrieval or manual methods to construct demonstrations for each example in instruction fine-tuning. Moreover, we reformulate the model’s output into a chain-of-thought format with calculation expressions to enhance its reasoning performance for reasoning subtasks. The competitive results in all subtasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our systems.