Learning to Automatically Solve Algebra Word Problems

Abstract

We present an approach for automatically learning to solve algebra word problems. Our algorithm reasons across sentence boundaries to construct and solve a system of linear equations, while simultaneously recovering an alignment of the variables and numbers in these equations to the problem text. The learning algorithm uses varied supervision, including either full equations or just the final answers. We evaluate performance on a newly gathered corpus of algebra word problems, demonstrating that the system can correctly answer almost 70% of the questions in the dataset. This is, to our knowledge, the first learning result for this task.