Chapter 7

STUDENT: Solving Algebra Word Problems

[This] is an example par excellence of the power of using meaning to solve linguistic problems

Marvin Minsky (1968)

MIT computer scientist

STUDENT was another early language understanding program, written by Daniel Bobrow as his Ph.D. research project in 1964. It was designed to read and solve the kind of word problems found in high school algebra books. An example is:

If the number of customers Tom gets is twice the square of 20% of the number of advertisements he runs, and the number of advertisements is 45, then what is the number of customers Tom gets?

STUDENT could correctly reply that the number of customers is 162. To do this, STUDENT must be far more sophisticated than ELIZA; it must process ...

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