  The Natural Language for Optimization (NL4Opt) Competition was created to
investigate methods of extracting the meaning and formulation of an
optimization problem based on its text description. Specifically, the goal of
the competition is to increase the accessibility and usability of optimization
solvers by allowing non-experts to interface with them using natural language.
We separate this challenging goal into two sub-tasks: (1) recognize and label
the semantic entities that correspond to the components of the optimization
problem; (2) generate a meaning representation (i.e., a logical form) of the
problem from its detected problem entities. The first task aims to reduce
ambiguity by detecting and tagging the entities of the optimization problems.
The second task creates an intermediate representation of the linear
programming (LP) problem that is converted into a format that can be used by
commercial solvers. In this report, we present the LP word problem dataset and
shared tasks for the NeurIPS 2022 competition. Furthermore, we investigate and
compare the performance of the ChatGPT large language model against the winning
solutions. Through this competition, we hope to bring interest towards the
development of novel machine learning applications and datasets for
optimization modeling.
