Verb Categorisation for H indi Word Problem Solving (2023)

Abstract: Word problem Solving is a challenging NLP task that deals with solving mathematical probglems described in natural language. Recently, there has been renewed interest in developing word problem solvers for Indian languages. As part of this paper, we have built a Hindi arithmetic word problem solver which makes use of verbs. Additionally, we have created verb categorization data for Hindi. Verbs are very important for solving word problems with addition/subtraction operations as they help us identify the set of operations required to solve the word problems. We propose a rule-based solver that uses verb categorisation to identify operations in a word problem and generate answers for it. To perform verb categorisation, we explore several approaches and present a comparative study.

## introduction verb categorisation is the most intuitive and explainable semantic parsing approach for word problem solving. this approach was introduced in hosseini et al. @xcite . it uses verbs to identify operations required to solve a word problem. the idea is to identify the following parts of a word problem on top of which we use verb categories to perform calculations: this can be explained using the following example: figure 1 : example of solving word problem using verbs leveraging the insights provided by @xcite , as part of this paper, we make the following contributions: ## solver we build a simple rule-based system that takes in a word problem and generates answers to the word problem. for each problem, we iterate through all tokens in each of its sentences and follow the rules mentioned below. ## limitations apart from the limitations of the solver, the method of using verb categorisation to solve word problems also has some limitations. as stated, solving word problems using verb categorisation is only limited to addition and subtraction word problems because verbs can only help us identify these operations. moreover, there were errors in the dependency labels. since verb categorisation very heavily relies on these parsers from finding verb categories to identifying entities, containers and actions/verbs for solving the word problems. this adds to the limitation of this method. ## conclusion and future work in this paper, we create a rule-based and easily explainable solver that uses verb categorisation technique to identify operations to solve word problems. this can be used as a teaching aid for both students and teachers. as part of the verb categorisation task, we run experiments with three approaches: verb distance (no training involved), statistical, and neural approaches using muril. as part of future work, we will explore more approaches to improve the accuracy of our solver and its range, i.e., solving word problems with multiplication and division operations.