Introducing MathQA -- A Math-Aware Question Answering System
This work addresses the need for accessible mathematical computation for users in English or Hindi, though it is incremental as it builds on existing platforms like Ask Platypus and Wikidata.
The authors tackled the problem of math-aware question answering by developing an open-source system that returns mathematical formulas from Wikidata for natural language questions, translating them to computable data with sympy, and in a user study, it outperformed a commercial engine by 13%.
We present an open source math-aware Question Answering System based on Ask Platypus. Our system returns as a single mathematical formula for a natural language question in English or Hindi. This formulae originate from the knowledge-base Wikidata. We translate these formulae to computable data by integrating the calculation engine sympy into our system. This way, users can enter numeric values for the variables occurring in the formula. Moreover, the system loads numeric values for constants occurring in the formula from Wikidata. In a user study, our system outperformed a commercial computational mathematical knowledge engine by 13%. However, the performance of our system heavily depends on the size and quality of the formula data available in Wikidata. Since only a few items in Wikidata contained formulae when we started the project, we facilitated the import process by suggesting formula edits to Wikidata editors. With the simple heuristic that the first formula is significant for the article, 80% of the suggestions were correct.