Quantitative and numerical comprehension in language is an important task in many fields like education and finance, but still remains a challenging task for language models. While tool and calculator usage has shown to be helpful to improve mathematical reasoning in large pretrained decoder-only language models, this remains unexplored for smaller language models with encoders. In this paper, we propose Pre-Calc, a simple pre-finetuning objective of learning to use the calculator for both encoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures, formulated as a discriminative and generative task respectively. We pre-train BERT and RoBERTa for discriminative calculator use and Flan-T5 for generative calculator use on the MAWPS, SVAMP, and AsDiv-A datasets, which improves performance on downstream tasks that require numerical understanding. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/calc-cmu/pre-calc.

Writing computer programs is a skill that remains inaccessible to most due to the barrier of programming language (PL) syntax. While large language models (LLMs) have been proposed to translate natural language pseudocode to PL code, they are costly in terms of data and compute. We propose a lightweight alternative to LLMs that exploits the property of code wherein most tokens can be simply copied from the pseudocode. We divide the problem into three phases: Copy, Generate, and Combine. In the Copy Phase, a binary classifier is employed to determine and mask the pseudocode tokens that can be directly copied into the code. In the Generate Phase, a Sequence-to-Sequence model is used to generate the masked PL code equivalent. In the Combine Phase, the generated sequence is combined with the tokens that the Copy Phase had masked. We show that our C3PO models achieve similar performance to non-C3PO models while reducing the computational cost of training as well as the vocabulary sizes.