MWPRanker: An Expression Similarity Based Math Word Problem Retriever
This work addresses the need for automated retrieval of similar math word problems in online assessments, which is incremental as it builds on existing retrieval methods by focusing on arithmetic and logical sequences.
The authors tackled the problem of manually identifying math word problems (MWPs) with similar problem models by proposing MWPRanker, a tool that retrieves similar MWPs based on expression similarity, outperforming semantic similarity-based approaches.
Math Word Problems (MWPs) in online assessments help test the ability of the learner to make critical inferences by interpreting the linguistic information in them. To test the mathematical reasoning capabilities of the learners, sometimes the problem is rephrased or the thematic setting of the original MWP is changed. Since manual identification of MWPs with similar problem models is cumbersome, we propose a tool in this work for MWP retrieval. We propose a hybrid approach to retrieve similar MWPs with the same problem model. In our work, the problem model refers to the sequence of operations to be performed to arrive at the solution. We demonstrate that our tool is useful for the mentioned tasks and better than semantic similarity-based approaches, which fail to capture the arithmetic and logical sequence of the MWPs. A demo of the tool can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSQWP3chFIs