Neural Arithmetic Expression Calculator
This addresses a challenging problem in neural computation for AI systems, but it is incremental as it builds on prior work by extending capabilities to more operations.
The paper tackles the problem of solving complex arithmetic expressions with operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and bracketing using a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach, and experiments show it significantly outperforms previous models.
This paper presents a pure neural solver for arithmetic expression calculation (AEC) problem. Previous work utilizes the powerful capabilities of deep neural networks and attempts to build an end-to-end model to solve this problem. However, most of these methods can only deal with the additive operations. It is still a challenging problem to solve the complex expression calculation problem, which includes the adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing and bracketing operations. In this work, we regard the arithmetic expression calculation as a hierarchical reinforcement learning problem. An arithmetic operation is decomposed into a series of sub-tasks, and each sub-task is dealt with by a skill module. The skill module could be a basic module performing elementary operations, or interactive module performing complex operations by invoking other skill models. With curriculum learning, our model can deal with a complex arithmetic expression calculation with the deep hierarchical structure of skill models. Experiments show that our model significantly outperforms the previous models for arithmetic expression calculation.