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{{About|the artificial intelligence program||Student (disambiguation)}}
'''STUDENT''' is an early [[artificial intelligence]] program that solves algebra word problems. It is written in [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] by [[Daniel G. Bobrow]] as his PhD thesis in 1964 (Bobrow 1964). It was designed to read and solve the kind of word problems found in high school algebra books.<ref name="norvig">{{cite book |last= Norvig|first= Peter |title=Paradigms of artificial intelligence programming:case studies in Common Lisp|location=[[San Francisco]], [[California]]|publisher=Morgan Kaufmann|year= 1992|pages=109–149|isbn= 1-55860-191-0}}</ref> The program is often cited as an early accomplishment of AI in [[natural language processing]].

==Technical description==
Within [[MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory#Project_MAC|Project MAC]] at [[MIT]], the STUDENT system was an early example of a [[question answering]] software, which uniquely involved natural language processing and [[symbolic programming]].<ref>{{cite thesis |type=PhD |title=Natural language input for a computer problem solving system |author=Bobrow, Daniel G |year=1964 |publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology }}</ref> Other early attempts for solving [[Word problem (mathematics education)|algebra story problems]] were realized with 1960s hardware and software as well: for example, the Philips, Baseball and Synthex systems.<ref>{{cite thesis |type=PhD |title=SIR: A computer program for semantic information retrieval |author=Raphael, Bertram |year=1964 |publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology }}</ref>

STUDENT accepts an algebra story written in the English language as input, and generates a number as output. This is realized with a layered pipeline that consists of [[Heuristic (computer science)|heuristics]] for pattern transformation. At first, sentences in English are converted into kernel sentences, which each contain a single piece of information. Next, the kernel sentences are converted into mathematical expressions.<ref>{{cite conference |doi=10.18653/v1/d15-1135 |year=2015 |publisher=Association for Computational Linguistics |author=Shuming Shi and Yuehui Wang and Chin-Yew Lin and Xiaojiang Liu and Yong Rui |title=Automatically Solving Number Word Problems by Semantic Parsing and Reasoning |conference=Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing |doi-access=free }}</ref> The knowledge base that supports the transformation contains 52 facts.{{clarification needed|date=March 2020}}<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01083.x |year=2010 |publisher=Wiley |volume=2 |number=3 |pages=345–356 |author=Kenneth D. Forbus |title=AI and Cognitive Science: The Past and Next 30 Years |journal=Topics in Cognitive Science |pmid=25163864 |doi-access=free }}</ref>

STUDENT uses a [[rule-based system]] with logic inference.<ref>{{cite conference |title=Designing a tag-based statistical math word problem solver with reasoning and explanation |author=Lin, Yi-Chung and Liang, Chao-Chun and Hsu, Kuang-Yi and Huang, Chien-Tsung and Miao, Shen-Yun and Ma, Wei-Yun and Ku, Lun-Wei and Liau, Churn-Jung and Su, Keh-Yih |conference=International Journal of Computational Linguistics & Chinese Language Processing, Volume 20, Number 2, December 2015-Special Issue on Selected Papers from ROCLING XXVII |year=2015 }}</ref> The rules are pre-programmed by the software developer and are able to [[Parsing|parse]] natural language.

More powerful techniques for natural language processing, such as [[machine learning]], came into use later as hardware grew more capable, and gained popularity over simpler rule-based systems.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1109/tpami.2019.2914054 |year=2019 |publisher=Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |author=Dongxiang Zhang and Lei Wang and Luming Zhang and Bing Tian Dai and Heng Tao Shen |title=The Gap of Semantic Parsing: A Survey on Automatic Math Word Problem Solvers |journal=IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence |volume=42 |issue=9 |pages=2287–2305 |pmid=31056490 |arxiv=1808.07290 |s2cid=52066980 }}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}
* [http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5922 Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System], Bobrow's PhD thesis.
* {{Russell Norvig 2003}}, p. 19
* {{Crevier 1993}}, pp. 76–79

[[Category:1964 software]]
[[Category:History of artificial intelligence]]
[[Category:Lisp (programming language) software]]
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