Learning to solve arithmetic word problems with verb categorization

This paper presents a novel approach to learning to solve simple arithmetic word problems. Our system, ARIS, analyzes each of the sentences in the problem state-ment to identify the relevant variables and their values. ARIS then maps this infor-mation into an equation that represents the problem, and enables its (trivial) so-lution as shown in Figure 1. The pa-per analyzes the arithmetic-word problems “genre”, identifying seven categories of verbs used in such problems. ARIS learns to categorize verbs with 81.2 % accuracy, and is able to solve 77.7 % of the problems in a corpus of standard primary school test questions. We report the first learning re-sults on this task without reliance on pre-defined templates and make our data pub-licly available.