Mathematical Information Retrieval Trends and Techniques

Mathematical formulas are widely used to express ideas and fundamental principles of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The rapidly growing research in science and engineering leads to a generation of a huge number of scientific documents which contain both textual as well as mathematical terms. In a scientific document, the sense of mathematical formulae is conveyed through the context and the symbolic structure which follows the strong domain specific conventions. In contrast to textual information, developed mathematical information retrieval systems have demonstrated the unique and elite indexing and matching approaches which are beneficial to the retrieval of formulae and scientific term. This chapter discusses the recent advancement in formula-based search engines, various formula representation styles and indexing techniques, benefits of formula-based search engines in various future applications like plagiarism detection, math recommendation system, etc.

SciMath: A Mathematical Information Retrieval System using Signature Based B Tree Indexing

Given a mathematical query, traditional text retrieval systems are not very effective in retrieving mathematical information from scientific documents. This paper presents the design and implementation of a new mathematical information retrieval (MIR) system: SciMath, which can take a mathematical formulae as a query and retrieve the relevant scientific documents consisting the relevant mathematical contents based on a B-Tree indexing scheme. The proposed system is then compared with two classical math-aware search engines to prove its effectiveness.

Mathematical Document Retrieval System based on Signature Hashing

Scientific documents and magazines involve large number of mathematical expressions and formulas along with text. The continuous growth of such documents necessitates the requirement of developing specialized tools and techniques, which could handle and analyse mathematical expressions and formulas. Mathematical expressions and formulae are highly structured and quite different from traditional text. Due to which conventional text retrieval system performs poorly in retrieving scientific documents based on mathematical expression formulated as a query. Mathematical information retrieval is concerned with finding information in documents that include mathematics. To address the challenges posed by mathematical formulae as compared to text, this paper aims to construct a math aware search engine, which can retrieve relevant scientific documents based on a mathematical query. A novel signature based hashing scheme to index raw mathematical web documents is proposed in this paper, which can also take mathematical notational equivalences into account. The proposed system demonstrates better precision and stability of the ranked results when compared with other related state-of-the-art math aware search engines.