{"id":171492,"date":"2015-08-15T04:11:46","date_gmt":"2015-08-15T04:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/sigmadolphin\/"},"modified":"2022-12-02T11:26:44","modified_gmt":"2022-12-02T19:26:44","slug":"sigmadolphin","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/sigmadolphin\/","title":{"rendered":"SigmaDolphin: Automated Math Word Problem Solving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building a computer system to automatically solve math word problems written in natural language. SigmaDolphin is a project initiated in early 2013 at Microsoft Research Asia, with the primary goal of building a computer intelligent system with natural language understanding<\/u> and reasoning<\/u> capacities. We focus on the application of automatic problem solving<\/u>, i.e., automatically solving problems (especially math word problems) written in natural language.<\/p>\n

Motivation<\/h2>\n

Computer programs can complete many tasks much more effectively and efficiently than human beings, such as calculating the product of two large numbers, or finding all occurrences of a string in a long text. However, the performance of computers on many intelligent tasks is still low. For example, in a chatting scenario, computers often generate irrelevant or incorrect responses; and we can easily find ridiculous results in automatic machine translation; and it is still a very challenging task for state-of-the-art computer programs to solve even primary-school-level math word problems.<\/p>\n

A well trained person can apparently outperform computers on the above intelligent tasks. The main reason, we believe, lies in our amazing power of natural language understanding and reasoning (especially common sense reasoning) over state-of-the-art artificial intelligent (AI) systems.<\/p>\n

Once we are able to empower computers with the ability of natural language understanding and reasoning, we may see significant performance improvements on text processing tasks like question answering and machine translation. In addition, it may open doors to new applications which are impractical so far because of the limited intelligent level of current computer systems.<\/p>\n

Present Targeting Scenario: Math Word Problem Solving<\/h2>\n

We drive our system design and implementation by the scenario of automatically solving math word problems. It is an ideal starting point to our research because of the following reasons:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Math word problems typically contain concise text with clear semantics<\/li>\n
  2. They fundamentally cover a wide range of domains (considering the fact that math word problems are often simplified versions of real problems from various domains)<\/li>\n
  3. It is relatively easy to measure performance: A lot of problems have been compiled for education purpose; one can often unambiguously determine whether the solutions of a math problem is correct or not.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Research Topics<\/h2>\n

    The following research topics are highly related to our project.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Meaning representation: How to represent the semantic meaning of natural language text<\/li>\n
    2. Semantic parsing: How to parse natural language text into structured semantic representation<\/li>\n
    3. Reasoning: How to perform reasoning based on the structured semantic representation as well as common sense knowledge<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Datasets<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n
      Dataset Name<\/span><\/strong><\/td>\nDescription<\/span><\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
      number_word_std<\/strong> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/td>\nA problem collection\u00a0containing 1,878 number word problems, used as evaluation data in our EMNLP’15\u00a0paper. Some subsets are included: linear, linear_t2, and linear_t6. Each subset is further divided into a dev set and a test set. Refer to\u00a0sigmadolphin.datasets.pdf (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for more details.<\/span>r more details.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
      Dolphin18K<\/strong> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/td>\nDolphin18K is a dataset created for math word problem solving, containing 18,460 problems posted by users on the community question answering site, Yahoo! Answers. Please refer to dolphin18.pdf<\/strong> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> for more details. Please cite our ACL 2016 paper (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> when you use this dataset in your research.<\/span><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Building a computer system to automatically solve math word problems written in natural language. SigmaDolphin is a project initiated in early 2013 at Microsoft Research Asia, with the primary goal of building a computer intelligent system with natural language understanding and reasoning capacities. We focus on the application of automatic problem solving, i.e., automatically solving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"research-area":[13556,13545,13555],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-171492","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-human-language-technologies","msr-research-area-search-information-retrieval","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-active"],"msr_project_start":"2015-08-15","related-publications":[650316,650322,650331,650337,650343,714790],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[144919],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Chin-Yew Lin","user_id":31493,"people_section":"Group 1","alias":"cyl"},{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Danqing Huang","user_id":38724,"people_section":"Group 1","alias":"dahua"}],"msr_research_lab":[199560],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/171492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-project"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/171492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903885,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/171492\/revisions\/903885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=171492"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=171492"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=171492"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=171492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}