Math Word Problem Generation with Mathematical Consistency and Problem Context Constraints
This work improves automated educational content creation for math learners by enhancing problem diversity and accuracy, though it is incremental in refining existing generation methods.
The paper tackled generating arithmetic math word problems from equations and contexts, addressing issues of mathematical invalidity and poor language quality, and demonstrated superior performance on three real-world datasets.
We study the problem of generating arithmetic math word problems (MWPs) given a math equation that specifies the mathematical computation and a context that specifies the problem scenario. Existing approaches are prone to generating MWPs that are either mathematically invalid or have unsatisfactory language quality. They also either ignore the context or require manual specification of a problem template, which compromises the diversity of the generated MWPs. In this paper, we develop a novel MWP generation approach that leverages i) pre-trained language models and a context keyword selection model to improve the language quality of the generated MWPs and ii) an equation consistency constraint for math equations to improve the mathematical validity of the generated MWPs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three real-world MWP datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to various baselines.