Rendering expressions to improve accuracy of relevance assessment for math search

Abstract

Finding ways to help users assess relevance when they search using math expressions is critical for making Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR) systems easier to use. We designed a study where participants completed search tasks involving mathematical expressions using two different summary styles, and measured response time and relevance assessment accuracy. The control summary style used Google's regular hit formatting where expressions are presented as text (e.g. in L A T E X), while the second summary style renders the math expressions. Participants were undergraduate and graduate students. Participants in the rendered summary style (n = 19) had on average a 17.18% higher assessment accuracy than those in the non-rendered summary style (n = 19), with no significant difference in response times. Participants in the rendered condition reported having fewer problems reading hits than participants in the control condition. This suggests that users will benefit from search engines that properly render math expressions in their hit summaries.

Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval

“…how search hits are presented to the user [36]. In a recent study it was confirmed that as one expects, the formatting of math expressions significantly affects relevance assessment of search hits [25]. The normal hit format provided by Google (e.g.…”