What Makes Math Word Problems Challenging for LLMs?

Kv Aditya Srivatsa; Ekaterina Kochmar

NAACL 2024findings17 citations

What Makes Math Word Problems Challenging for LLMs?

Abstract

This paper investigates the question of what makes math word problems (MWPs) in English challenging for large language models (LLMs). We conduct an in-depth analysis of the key linguistic and mathematical characteristics of MWPs. In addition, we train feature-based classifiers to better understand the impact of each feature on the overall difficulty of MWPs for prominent LLMs and investigate whether this helps predict how well LLMs fare against specific categories of MWPs.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{srivatsa-kochmar-2024-makes,
    title = "What Makes Math Word Problems Challenging for {LLM}s?",
    author = "Srivatsa, Kv Aditya  and
      Kochmar, Ekaterina",
    editor = "Duh, Kevin  and
      Gomez, Helena  and
      Bethard, Steven",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024",
    month = jun,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.72/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.72",
    pages = "1138--1148"
}