Learn to Solve Algebra Word Problems Using Quadratic Programming

This paper presents a new algorithm to automatically solve algebra word prob-lems. Our algorithm solves a word prob-lem via analyzing a hypothesis space con-taining all possible equation systems gen-erated by assigning the numbers in the word problem into a set of equation sys-tem templates extracted from the training data. To obtain a robust decision surface, we train a log-linear model to make the margin between the correct assignments and the false ones as large as possible. This results in a quadratic programming (QP) problem which can be efficiently solved. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves 79.7 % accuracy, about 10 % higher than the state-of-the-art base-line (Kushman et al., 2014).