Investigating Math Word Problems using Pretrained Multilingual Language Models

Anonymous

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit math word problems~(MWPs) from the {\em cross-lingual} and {\em multilingual} perspective.We construct our MWP solvers over pretrained multilingual language models using the sequence-to-sequence model with copy mechanism.We compare how the MWP solvers perform in cross-lingual and multilingual scenarios.To facilitate the comparison of cross-lingual performance, we first adapt the large-scale English dataset MathQA as a counterpart of the Chinese dataset Math23K.Then we extend several English datasets to bilingual datasets through machine translation plus human annotation.Our experiments show that the MWP solvers may not be transferred to a different language even if the target expressions share the same numerical constants and operator set.However, it can be better generalized if problem types exist on both source language and target language.

Paper Type: short