Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation

Polozov, Oleksandr; O&apos;Rourke, Eleanor; Smith, Adam M.; Zettlemoyer, Luke; Gulwani, Sumit; Popovic, Zoran

Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation

Oleksandr Polozov, Eleanor O'Rourke, Adam M. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sumit Gulwani, Zoran Popovic

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Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 381-387.

Abstract

Word problems are an established technique for teaching mathematical modeling skills in K-12 education. However, many students find word problems unconnected to their lives, artificial, and uninteresting. Most students find them much more difficult than the corresponding symbolic representations. To account for this phenomenon, an ideal pedagogy might involve an individually crafted progression of unique word problems that form a personalized plot. We propose a novel technique for automatic generation of personalized word problems. In our system, word problems are generated from general specifications using answer-set programming (ASP). The specifications include tutor requirements (properties of a mathematical model), and student requirements (personalization, characters, setting). Our system takes a logical encoding of the specification, synthesizes a word problem narrative and its mathematical model as a labeled logical plot graph, and realizes the problem in natural language. Human judges found our problems as solvable as the textbook problems, with a slightly more artificial language.

Oleksandr Polozov, Eleanor O'Rourke, Adam M. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Sumit Gulwani, and Zoran Popovic. 2015. Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15. IJCAI, 381–387. https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/60

@inproceedings{ijcai2015p60,
  title     = {Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation},
  author    = {Polozov, Oleksandr and O&apos;Rourke, Eleanor and Smith, Adam M. and Zettlemoyer, Luke and Gulwani, Sumit and Popovic, Zoran},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-15}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence},
  editor    = {Qiang Yang and Michael Wooldridge},
  pages     = {381--387},
  year      = {2015},
  month     = {7},
  note      = {Main Track},
  url       = {https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/60},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Personalized Mathematical Word Problem Generation
AU  - Polozov, Oleksandr
AU  - O&apos;Rourke, Eleanor
AU  - Smith, Adam M.
AU  - Zettlemoyer, Luke
AU  - Gulwani, Sumit
AU  - Popovic, Zoran
T2  - Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-15
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
PY  - 2015
SP  - 381
EP  - 387
UR  - https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2015/60
ER  -