Discrete Reasoning Templates for Natural Language Understanding

Reasoning about information from multiple parts of a passage to derive an answer is an open challenge for reading-comprehension models. In this paper, we present an approach that reasons about complex questions by decomposing them to simpler subquestions that can take advantage of single-span extraction reading-comprehension models, and derives the final answer according to instructions in a predefined reasoning template. We focus on subtraction based arithmetic questions and evaluate our approach on a subset of the DROP dataset. We show that our approach is competitive with the state of the art while being interpretable and requires little supervision.