A question-answering system for high school algebra word problems (1964)

dl.acm.org

7 pointsLiamPowell2 comments

Over the last few years I've seen many examples of LLMs being used for the same kind of problems as in this paper. While it's undeniably impressive for an LLM to do these things, it seems that often the fact that NLP existed well before LLMs is completely forgotten.

Additionally, while LLMs are of course capable of solving a much broader set of problems, it is often the case that all questions presented in a given demo could be solved using a small program such as this.

Hear! Hear! It’s really frustrating to see so many people act as if there is nothing but neural network based approaches that work for anything moderately complex.

It’s not a good sign that there is little to no understanding of even recent history in the academic disciplines becoming inundated with NNs. Just today I skimmed an article that had a “history” of NLP that completely ignored symbolic and statistical approaches that focus on, you know, parsing natural language…

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