A Mathematical Word Problem Generator with Structure Planning and Knowledge Enhancement

Longhu Qin, Jiayu Liu, Zhenya Huang, Kai Zhang, Qi Liu, Binbin Jin, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Automatically generating controllable and diverse mathematical word problems (MWPs) which conform to equations and topics is a crucial task in information retrieval and natural language generation. Recent deep learning models mainly focus on improving the problem readability but overlook the mathematical logic coherence, which tends to generate unsolvable problems. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the human problem-designing process and propose a Mathematical structure Planning and Knowledge enhanced Generation model (MaPKG), following the "plan-then-generate" steps. Specifically, we propose a novel dynamic planning module to make sentence-level equation plans and a dual-attention mechanism for word-level generation, incorporating equation structure representation and external commonsense knowledge. Extensive experiments on two MWP datasets show our model can guarantee more solvable, high-quality, and diverse problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/KenelmQLH/MaPKG.git