Multilingual Access to Mathematical Exercise Problems

Abstract

TheWeb Advanced Learning Technologies (WebALT) project, financed through the European Union’s eContent programme, is working to provide pan-European (and eventually world-wide) multilingual and multicultural internet access to a repository of algorithmically generated exercises for students and teachers of mathematics at the secondary and tertiary education levels, building as much as possible on existing frameworks, standards, and software. The two-year WebALT project has reached its quarter mark now, and we can now report early results. We are working on a framework in which a large percentage of undergraduate and highschool mathematics exercises can be created in the language independent form of content markup in a way that captures both the meaning of the simple sentences and the formulas embedded in them that together make up a math problem. Such content, expressed in OpenMath because it is more easily extended with the extra concepts required here, is then localized using language-specific content-topresentation markup stylesheets for the embedded formulae, and natural language generation techniques for rendering the embedding sentences that tell the students what to do with those formulae in the language of their choice.