@inproceedings{ling-etal-2017-program,
    title = "Program Induction by Rationale Generation: Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems",
    author = "Ling, Wang  and
      Yogatama, Dani  and
      Dyer, Chris  and
      Blunsom, Phil",
    editor = "Barzilay, Regina  and
      Kan, Min-Yen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Vancouver, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/P17-1015/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P17-1015",
    pages = "158--167",
    abstract = "Solving algebraic word problems requires executing a series of arithmetic operations{---}a program{---}to obtain a final answer. However, since programs can be arbitrarily complicated, inducing them directly from question-answer pairs is a formidable challenge. To make this task more feasible, we solve these problems by generating answer rationales, sequences of natural language and human-readable mathematical expressions that derive the final answer through a series of small steps. Although rationales do not explicitly specify programs, they provide a scaffolding for their structure via intermediate milestones. To evaluate our approach, we have created a new 100,000-sample dataset of questions, answers and rationales. Experimental results show that indirect supervision of program learning via answer rationales is a promising strategy for inducing arithmetic programs."
}