Solving Math Word Problems concerning Systems of Equations with GPT-3

Abstract

Researchers have been interested in developing AI tools to help students learn various mathematical subjects. One challenging set of tasks for school students is learning to solve math word problems. We explore how recent advances in natural language processing, specifically the rise of powerful transformer based models, can be applied to help math learners with such problems. Concretely, we evaluate the use of GPT-3, a 1.75B parameter transformer model recently released by OpenAI, for three related challenges pertaining to math word problems corresponding to systems of two linear equations. The three challenges are classifying word problems, extracting equations from word problems, and generating word problems. For the first challenge, we define a set of problem classes and find that GPT-3 has generally very high accuracy in classifying word problems (80%-100%), for all but one of these classes. For the second challenge, we find the accuracy for extracting equations improves with number of examples provided to the model, ranging from an accuracy of 31% for zero-shot learning to about 69% using 3-shot learning, which is further improved to a high value of 80% with fine-tuning. For the third challenge, we find that GPT-3 is able to generate problems with accuracy ranging from 33% to 93%, depending on the problem type.