Sentence based mathematical problem solving approach via ontology modeling

Abstract

Mathematics includes solving a variety of problems by applying theories and formulas. Thus mathematical problem solving requires performing arithmetical operations by using analytical and problem solving skills. Sentence based mathematical problems contains real world scenarios and requires to apply both mathematical and problem analyzing knowledge to solve problems. Human beings solve sentence based mathematical problems by applying different mathematical formulas and theorems to the comprehend questions. Understanding the sentence based questions requires an additional effort to grab the content and grasped content should be mapped with known concepts in terms of variables. Organizing the variables and formulas by understanding the relationships and properties would be important to formulate the answer. Thus the content can be easily modeled using an ontological approach and the problem solving can be accomplished by querying the ontology using a multi agent approach. Sentenced based mathematical problem solving approach demonstrates a system which can solve mathematical questions by acquiring the semantics of the question and applying learnt formulas. Information extraction from the question, ontology based knowledge representation, multi agent based ontology querying and answer generation with explanations can be defined as major functions. This approach can be used to introduce effective intelligent tutoring systems in any domain.