Solving Solid Geometric Calculation Problems in Text

Abstract

Solving solid geometric calculation problems is a hard branch problem in problem solving because it usually requires both qualitative reasoning and quantitative calculation to produce the solutions. This paper proposes a solver to solve the solid geometric calculation problems in text. First, it extracts a group of geometric relations from the problem text as the outcome of problem understanding by adopting syntactic-semantic method. Then, it finds out that the given problem should calculate on which solid geometric subject so that it constructs the subject in 3D Cartesian coordinate system. Finally, it calculates the answer using coordinate system, and generates readable solution including the solution text and 3D diagram. The proposed solver is tested on a dataset including 140 solid geometric calculation problems. The test result shows that the solver proposed in this paper achieves an accuracy of 76.43%.