{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/algebra-error-classification-with-large","title":"Algebra Error Classification with Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2305.06163","date":"2023-05-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hunter McNichols","Mengxue Zhang","Andrew Lan"],"abstract":"Automated feedback as students answer open-ended math questions has significant potential in improving learning outcomes at large scale. A key part of automated feedback systems is an error classification component, which identifies student errors and enables appropriate, predefined feedback to be deployed. Most existing approaches to error classification use a rule-based method, which has limited capacity to generalize. Existing data-driven methods avoid these limitations but specifically require mathematical expressions in student responses to be parsed into syntax trees. This requirement is itself a limitation, since student responses are not always syntactically valid and cannot be converted into trees. In this work, we introduce a flexible method for error classification using pre-trained large language models. We demonstrate that our method can outperform existing methods in algebra error classification, and is able to classify a larger set of student responses. Additionally, we analyze common classification errors made by our method and discuss limitations of automated error classification.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.06163v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06163v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"algebra-error-classification-with-large","repo_url":"https://github.com/umass-ml4ed/cogtutorbugs","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"task_slug":"math","task_name":"Math"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.06163","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}