We explore contemporary, data-driven techniques for solving math word problems over recent large-scale datasets. We show that well-tuned neural equation classifiers can outperform more sophisticated models such as sequence to sequence and self-attention across these datasets. Our error analysis indicates that, while fully data driven models show some promise, semantic and world knowledge is necessary for further advances.
We present a neural transducer model with visual attention that learns to generate LaTeX markup of a real-world math formula given its image. Applying sequence modeling and transduction techniques that have been very successful across modalities such as natural language, image, handwriting, speech and audio; we construct an image-to-markup model that learns to produce syntactically and semantically correct LaTeX markup code over 150 words long and achieves a BLEU score of 89%; improving upon the previous state-of-art for the Im2Latex problem. We also demonstrate with heat-map visualization how attention helps in interpreting the model and can pinpoint (detect and localize) symbols on the image accurately despite having been trained without any bounding box data.