Despite the popularity of storing mathematical objects on the web, searching for mathematical expressions is extremely limited. Conventional retrieval systems are inadequate for mathematical expressions, because they are not tuned for text with complex structures that include only a few distinct terms. Surprisingly current approaches to the problem of retrieving mathematical information do not include a formal definition of the similarity between two expressions, and thus fail to find many relevant documents. In this paper, we present steps to advance mathematics retrieval to incorporate best practices from modern information retrieval. We first review encodings of mathematical expressions currently found on the web, and present the results of our efforts to create an experimental testbed. We formally define the similarity between two mathematical expressions and present the problem of searching for similar mathematical expressions.
@article{702556,
title = {Improving Mathematics Retrieval},
booktitle = {Towards a Digital Mathematics Library. Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada, July 8-9th, 2009},
series = {GDML\_Books},
publisher = {Masaryk University Press},
address = {Brno, Czech Republic},
year = {2009},
pages = {37-48},
zbl = {1176.68070},
url = {http://dml.mathdoc.fr/item/702556}
}
Kamali, Shahab; Tompa, Frank Wm. Improving Mathematics Retrieval, dans Towards a Digital Mathematics Library. Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada, July 8-9th, 2009, GDML_Books, (2009), pp. 37-48. http://gdmltest.u-ga.fr/item/702556/
, http://db.uwaterloo.ca/mathretrieval.
, http://www.wikipedia.org.
, http://www.wolfram.com.
Searching techniques for integral tables, . In International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation, pages 133–139, 1995. (1995) | Zbl 0922.68041
Approximation and special cases of common subtrees and editing distance, . In Proc. 7th Ann. Int. Symp. on Algorithms and Computation, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 1178, Springer-Verlag, 1996. (1996) | MR 1615179
The OpenMath standard, . The OpenMath Esprit Consortium, 2002. (2002)
Technical aspects of the digital library of mathematical functions, . Ann. Math. Artificial Intelligence, 2002. (2002) | MR 1990417
Maple learning guide, . Maplesoft, a division of Waterloo Maple Inc, 2003. (2003)
A query language for a metadata framework about mathematical resources, . In Asperti, In et al, pages 105–118, 2003. (2003) | Zbl 1022.68616
Search of mathematical contents: Issues and methods, . IASSE, 2005. (2005)
Information retrieval and rendering with mml query, . In Proc. of MKM 2006, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 4108, pages 266–279. Springer Verlag, 2006. (2006) | Zbl 1188.68125
A search engine for mathematical formulae, . In Artificial Intelligence and Symbolic Computation, LNCS, pages 241–253, 2006. (2006) | Zbl 1156.68306
Mathfind: a math-aware search engine, . In SIGIR, page 735, 2006. (2006)
Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) version 3.0, . In W3C Working draft, 2007. (2007)
Methods of relevance ranking and hit-content generation in math search, . Calculemus/MKM, 2007. (2007) | Zbl 1202.68161
Mathematica 6, . Wolfram Research Documentation Center, 2008. (2008) | Zbl 1147.30002
Tralics, a latex to xml translator, . In INRIA, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Atomatique, 2008. (2008)