Knowledge Bases in mArachna
Sven Grottke, Sabina Jeschke, Nicole Natho, Ruedi Seiler · 2006
Automated extraction of knowledge from natural language texts is a major technical challenge that remains largely unsolved. Scientific texts in general, and mathematical texts in particular, are characterised by the use of complex language constructs with the intent to transfer knowl-edge. To a large extend, mathematical texts possess a strict internal structuring and can be separated into text elements such as definitions, theorems etc. These text elements are princi-pal carriers of mathematical information. In addition, these elements show a characteristic linguistic structuring well suited for natural language processing techniques. In this paper we present MARACHNA, a system for extracting mathematical relations from texts and integrating them into a knowledge base. In response to user queries, parts of the knowledge base are visualised using XML Topic Maps. In particular, MARACHNA aims to provide an overview of single fields of mathematics, as well as showing intra-field relations between mathematical objects and concepts.