Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

Kohlhase, Andrea

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08434-3_12

“…Typically it is not the case that only one document provides the correct answer; on the contrary the user may be interested in a corpora of different documents that yield different, only partially overlapping information. In [Koh14] and other papers there are attempts at a classification of the information needs of users. However, at the moment only the system described in [ZKT08] tries to use the classification to improve the user experience.…”

Section: Problem 1: Document Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first solution is the one preferred in the literature. In [Koh14] a comparison of the behaviour of mathematicians vs other users highlighted that the professional mathematician is more interested in the precision of the output than the effort put into the input. Therefore mathematicians may use and appreciate more complex interfaces.…”

Section: Problem 1: Document Retrievalmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

Guidi

¹

,

Coen

²

2016

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Abstract. We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques. Purpose Driven Taxonomy of Retrieval ProblemsRetrieval of mathematical knowledge is always presented as the low hanging fruit of Mathematical Knowledge Management, and it has been addressed in several papers by people coming either from the formal methods or from the information retrieval community. The problem being resistant to classical content search techniques [LRG13], it is usually addressed combining a small set of new ideas and techniques that are recurrent in the literature. Despite the amount of work, however, there is not a single solution that is the clearly winning on the others, nor convincing unbiased benchmarks to compare solutions. Some authors like [KK07] also suggest that the community should first better understand the actual needs of mathematicians from an unbiased perspective to improve the MKM technology as a whole. In this paper we collect a hopefully comprehensive bibliography, and we roughly classify the papers according to novel taxonomies both for the problems and the techniques employed. The only other surveys on the same topic are [AZ04], now outdated and focused mostly on (European) research projects that contributed to the topic in the 6th Framework Programme, [ZB12], which covers less literature in much greater detail without attempting a classification, [L13], which is focused on evaluation of mathematics retrieval, and [L10], which is written in Slovak.We begin our discussion with a purpose driven taxonomy made of three different retrieval problems that deal with mathematical knowledge. Each problem is characterised by its own set of expectations and constraints, and adopting a solution to another problem may be infeasible or yield poor results. In the next sections we classify the papers according to an encoding based taxonomy (presentation vs content vs semantics) and to a taxonomy of techniques employed. Finally we point to the rich literature relative to the problem of ranking, and we touch the problem of evaluation of systems. We conclude with some notes on the availability of math retrieval systems.⋆ The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com.

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A Survey on Retrieval of Mathematical Knowledge

Guidi

¹

,

Coen

²

2015

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. We present a short survey of the literature on indexing and retrieval of mathematical knowledge, with pointers to 72 papers and tentative taxonomies of both retrieval problems and recurring techniques. Purpose Driven Taxonomy of Retrieval ProblemsRetrieval of mathematical knowledge is always presented as the low hanging fruit of Mathematical Knowledge Management, and it has been addressed in several papers by people coming either from the formal methods or from the information retrieval community. The problem being resistant to classical content search techniques [LRG13], it is usually addressed combining a small set of new ideas and techniques that are recurrent in the literature. Despite the amount of work, however, there is not a single solution that is the clearly winning on the others, nor convincing unbiased benchmarks to compare solutions. Some authors like [KK07] also suggest that the community should first better understand the actual needs of mathematicians from an unbiased perspective to improve the MKM technology as a whole. In this paper we collect a hopefully comprehensive bibliography, and we roughly classify the papers according to novel taxonomies both for the problems and the techniques employed. The only other surveys on the same topic are [AZ04], now outdated and focused mostly on (European) research projects that contributed to the topic in the 6th Framework Programme, [ZB12], which covers less literature in much greater detail without attempting a classification, [L13], which is focused on evaluation of mathematics retrieval, and [L10], which is written in Slovak.We begin our discussion with a purpose driven taxonomy made of three different retrieval problems that deal with mathematical knowledge. Each problem is characterised by its own set of expectations and constraints, and adopting a solution to another problem may be infeasible or yield poor results. In the next sections we classify the papers according to an encoding based taxonomy (presentation vs content vs semantics) and to a taxonomy of techniques employed. Finally we point to the rich literature relative to the problem of ranking, and we touch the problem of evaluation of systems. We conclude with some notes on the availability of math retrieval systems.⋆ The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com.

show abstract