ComSearch: Equation Searching with Combinatorial Mathematics for Solving Math Word Problems with Weak Supervision

Anonymous

Abstract: Previous studies have introduced a weakly-supervised paradigm for solving math word problems requiring only the answer value annotation. While these methods search for correct value equation candidates as pseudo labels, they search among a narrow sub-space of the enormous equation space. To address this problem, we propose a novel search algorithm with combinatorial mathematics \textbf{ComSearch}, which can compress the search space by excluding mathematical equivalent equations. The compression allows the searching algorithm to enumerate all possible equations and obtain high-quality data. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results, especially for problems with more variables.