The AlphaPhysics Term Rewriting System for Marking Algebraic Expressions in Physics Exams

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Baumgartner, Peter, McGinness, Lachlan
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Baumgartner, Peter
McGinness, Lachlan
author_facet Baumgartner, Peter
McGinness, Lachlan
contents We present our method for automatically marking Physics exams. The marking problem consists in assessing typed student answers for correctness with respect to a ground truth solution. This is a challenging problem that we seek to tackle using a combination of a computer algebra system, an SMT solver and a term rewriting system. A Large Language Model is used to interpret and remove errors from student responses and rewrite these in a machine readable format. Once formalized and language-aligned, the next step then consists in applying automated reasoning techniques for assessing student solution correctness. We consider two methods of automated theorem proving: off-the-shelf SMT solving and term rewriting systems tailored for physics problems involving trigonometric expressions. The development of the term rewrite system and establishing termination and confluence properties was not trivial, and we describe it in some detail in the paper. We evaluate our system on a rich pool of over 1500 real-world student exam responses from the 2023 Australian Physics Olympiad.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_18337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The AlphaPhysics Term Rewriting System for Marking Algebraic Expressions in Physics Exams
Baumgartner, Peter
McGinness, Lachlan
Artificial Intelligence
We present our method for automatically marking Physics exams. The marking problem consists in assessing typed student answers for correctness with respect to a ground truth solution. This is a challenging problem that we seek to tackle using a combination of a computer algebra system, an SMT solver and a term rewriting system. A Large Language Model is used to interpret and remove errors from student responses and rewrite these in a machine readable format. Once formalized and language-aligned, the next step then consists in applying automated reasoning techniques for assessing student solution correctness. We consider two methods of automated theorem proving: off-the-shelf SMT solving and term rewriting systems tailored for physics problems involving trigonometric expressions. The development of the term rewrite system and establishing termination and confluence properties was not trivial, and we describe it in some detail in the paper. We evaluate our system on a rich pool of over 1500 real-world student exam responses from the 2023 Australian Physics Olympiad.
title The AlphaPhysics Term Rewriting System for Marking Algebraic Expressions in Physics Exams
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18337