Template-Driven LLM-Paraphrased Framework for Tabular Math Word Problem Generation
This work addresses the need for scalable, high-quality datasets for evaluating and enhancing mathematical reasoning in LLMs, though it is incremental as it builds on existing template and paraphrasing methods.
The authors tackled the challenge of generating high-quality tabular math word problems (TMWPs) for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), which often suffer from correctness or diversity issues, by proposing a template-driven LLM-paraphrased framework that produces accurate and diverse samples, resulting in improved TMWP solving performance across various LLMs.
Solving tabular math word problems (TMWPs) has become a critical role in evaluating the mathematical reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale TMWP samples are commonly required for LLM fine-tuning. Since the collection of high-quality TMWP datasets is costly and time-consuming, recent research has concentrated on automatic TMWP generation. However, current generated samples usually suffer from issues of either correctness or diversity. In this paper, we propose a Template-driven LLM-paraphrased (TeLL) framework for generating high-quality TMWP samples with diverse backgrounds and accurate tables, questions, answers, and solutions. To this end, we first extract templates from existing real samples to generate initial problems, ensuring correctness. Then, we adopt an LLM to extend templates and paraphrase problems, obtaining diverse TMWP samples. Furthermore, we find the reasoning annotation is important for solving TMWPs. Therefore, we propose to enrich each solution with illustrative reasoning steps. Through the proposed framework, we construct a high-quality dataset TabMWP-TeLL by adhering to the question types in the TabMWP dataset, and we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of LLMs to demonstrate the effectiveness of TabMWP-TeLL in improving TMWP solving performance. The code and data of this paper are available at: https://github.com/Jason8Kang/TELL.