Annotating Derivations: A New Evaluation Strategy and Dataset for Algebra Word Problems

Abstract: We propose a new evaluation for automatic solvers for algebra word problems, which can identify mistakes that existing evaluations overlook. Our proposal is to evaluate such solvers using derivations, which reflect how an equation system was constructed from the word problem. To accomplish this, we develop an algorithm for checking the equivalence between two derivations, and show how derivation an- notations can be semi-automatically added to existing datasets. To make our experiments more comprehensive, we include the derivation annotation for DRAW-1K, a new dataset containing 1000 general algebra word problems. In our experiments, we found that the annotated derivations enable a more accurate evaluation of automatic solvers than previously used metrics. We release derivation annotations for over 2300 algebra word problems for future evaluations.