Answering math queries with search engines

Kamali, Shahin; Apacible, Johnson; Hosseinkashi, Yasaman

doi:10.1145/2187980.2187986

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Indexing and other optimization techniques to reduce query processing time or index size is out of the scope of this paper (Elsewhere, we extensively discuss such optimization techniques [14].). In this paper, we also do not address the problem of evaluating mathematical expressions, which is the goal of systems such as Wolfram Alpha [1], or Bing Math [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Retrieving documents with mathematical content

Kamali

Tompa

2013

Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

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Many documents with mathematical content are published on the Web, but conventional search engines that rely on keyword search only cannot fully exploit their mathematical information. In particular, keyword search is insufficient when expressions in a document are not annotated with natural keywords or the user cannot describe her query with keywords. Retrieving documents by querying their mathematical content directly is very appealing in various domains such as education, digital libraries, engineering, patent documents, medical sciences, etc. Capturing the relevance of mathematical expressions also greatly enhances document classification in such domains.Unlike text retrieval, where keywords carry enough semantics to distinguish text documents and rank them, math symbols do not contain much semantic information on their own. In fact, mathematical expressions typically consist of few alphabetical symbols organized in rather complex structures. Hence, the structure of an expression, which describes the way such symbols are combined, should also be considered. Unfortunately, there is no standard testbed with which to evaluate the effectiveness of a mathematics retrieval algorithm.In this paper we study the fundamental and challenging problems in mathematics retrieval, that is how to capture the relevance of mathematical expressions, how to query them, and how to evaluate the results. We describe various search paradigms and propose retrieval systems accordingly. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, and further compare them through an extensive empirical study.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%