Machine-guided Solution to Mathematical Word Problems
Bussaba Amnueypornsakul, Suma Bhat · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2014
Mathematical word problems (MWP) test critical aspects of reading comprehension in conjunction with generating a solution that agrees with the "story" in the problem.In this paper we design and construct an MWP solver in a systematic manner, as a step towards enabling comprehension in mathematics and teaching problem solving for children in the elementary grades.We do this by (a) identifying the discourse structure of MWPs that will enable comprehension in mathematics, and (b) utilizing the information in the discourse structure towards generating the solution in a systematic manner.We build a multistage software prototype that predicts the problem type, identifies the function of sentences in each problem, and extracts the necessary information from the question to generate the corresponding mathematical equation.Our prototype has an accuracy of 86% on a large corpus of MWPs of three problem types from elementary grade mathematics curriculum.