@inproceedings{er-2026-math,
    title = "Math-{DB}: A Discourse Framework for Mathematical Word Problems to Enhance {LLM} Reasoning",
    author = "Er, Mustafa Erolcan",
    editor = "Liu, Yang Janet  and
      Gessler, Luke",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th Linguistic Annotation Workshop ({LAW} {XX})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.law-main.7/",
    pages = "75--94",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-404-0",
    abstract = "Large Language Models have demonstrated significant progress in solving mathematical word problems through techniques like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, recent research indicates that these models often rely on statistical regularities and surface-level patterns rather than true logical reasoning, leading to performance drops when faced with minor problem perturbations or irrelevant information. In this study, we introduce Math Discourse Bank (Math-DB), a novel discourse framework and annotated dataset designed to enhance LLM reasoning. Inspired by the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) and mathematics education research, Math-DB defines a hierarchy of discourse senses designed for quantitative reasoning, including categories such as Change, Combine, Compare, and Equalize. We applied this framework to the GSM-Symbolic dataset of 12,500 problems, yielding 47,815 sense-labeled discourse relations over 11,414 successfully-aligned instances (91.3{\%} pipeline yield). Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating Math-DB annotations into CoT prompts consistently improves LLM performance across various difficulty levels."
}