Machine-guided Solution to Mathematical Word Problems

Mathematical word problems (MWP) test crit- ical aspects of reading comprehension in con- junction 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 elemen- tary grades. We do this by (a) identifying the discourse structure of MWPs that will enable comprehension in mathematics, and (b) utiliz- ing the information in the discourse structure towards generatingthe solution ina systematic manner. We build a multistage software proto- type 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 math- ematical equation. Our prototype has an ac- curacy of 86% on a large corpus of MWPs of three problem types from elementary grade mathematics curriculum.