UW CSE’s Yoav Artzi and Luke Zettlemoyer and MIT CSAIL’s Regina Barzilay and Nate Kushman have developed a new computer system that can automatically solve the type of word problems common in introductory algebra classes. The work will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June.
In the near term, the work could lead to educational tools that identify errors in students’ reasoning or evaluate the difficulty of word problems. But it may also point toward systems that can solve more complicated problems in geometry, physics, and finance – problems whose solutions don’t appear in the back of the teacher’s edition of a textbook.
Read an MIT News post here. Check out the research paper here.