Teaching Neural Module Networks to Do Arithmetic

Abstract

Answering complex questions that require multi-step multi-type reasoning over raw text is challenging, especially when conducting numerical reasoning. Neural Module Networks (NMNs), follow the programmer-interpreter framework and design trainable modules to learn different reasoning skills. However, NMNs only have limited reasoning abilities, and lack numerical reasoning capability. We upgrade NMNs by: (a) bridging the gap between its interpreter and the complex questions; (b) introducing addition and subtraction modules that perform numerical reasoning over numbers. On a subset of DROP, experimental results show that our proposed methods enhance NMNs’ numerical reasoning skills by 17.7% improvement of F1 score and significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art models.