ISolveMath — Maths ‘ Word Problem ’ Solving and Visualisation
You can now have a look at the first model
https://medium.com/@purvanshimehta/can-computers-learn-maths-through-deep-learning-7ef714ca2cb3
Have you ever wondered what if our childhood fear of mathematics could be explained through animations and cartoons. Imagine pikachu explaining us addition , subtraction or Batman solving profit loss problems.
Beauty of human language has always intrigued humans. The way the brain resolves ambiguity and puts context into place and finds solutions to everything. The awe lies in way it forms relations and extracts conclusions.
Maths word problem solving
It is not yet clear how human brain understands mathematical language, forms equations and solves them. Let’s look how efficient computers are.
Question-
Joe has 3 friends who all have 5 toy cars, and then 2 friends who only have 2 cars. How many cars do Joe’s friends have?
This looks like very simple question for us to solve but at present there is no system which can solve this because of the complex language part.
Demo of the paper published in one of the top journals (AAAI 2017)
Euclid (developed by AllenAI)
Wolphram Alpha (The largest mathematical computation engine)
All the systems developed till today have very customised domains. Some papers define a method to solve these type of questions but then they are not able to solve questions like-
One number is 16 more than another. If the smaller number is subtracted from 2/3 of the larger, the result is 1/4 of the sum of the two numbers. Find
the numbers.
If you go deep into their procedures many of the things are hard coded and would only work to understand certain type of language patterns.
A solution to understand the mathematical language
This particular problem attracts me a lot. I looked at the patterns and decided to solve this in a completely different way. I think of it as a machine translation (from English to Mathematical language of expressions and functions).
Have a look at the initial release of ISolveMath —
Moreover forming an abstract meaning representation of the question is necessary rather than direct converting into equations.
Why such a system is necessary
From my research I came to know that there is no such thing as a mathematical brain. Anyone can love maths if he gets the right teachers. Almost everyone has clear basics when comes to simple addition, subtraction of direct numbers. But the number of people liking mathematics reduces as they have to associate language with maths. Having a system which can solve all maths word problem in form of visualisations would assist the teachers (in form of doubt clearing) and the students to solve their doubts.
People Involved
I am currently working in IIIT Hyderabad under the guidance of one of the most well known professors in the domain (NLP) in India.
Current Status
I am working on the automatic answer generation part from natural language. If you want to know more about it you can leave a comment or mail me.
ISolveMath
ISolveMath is not restricted to solving problems and providing an answer which would make the students lazier. The system would also provide an automatic explanation (in form of animations) generated from the question posted (which is basically “Generating animation in a coordinated way from natural language” ).
If you are interested in working on this with me or want to know more about how is it a generic solution or different from the systems present at the moment leave a comment or mail me at purvanshi.mehta11[at]gmail[dot]com.
