An Approach to Similarity Search for Mathematical Expressions using MathML
Keisuke Yokoi, Akiko Aizawa · Czech digital mathematics library · 2009
summary:The recent global computerization and digitization trend has helped to increase the numbers of documents with mathematical expressions on the Web. These mathematical expressions have their own unique structures, and therefore, it is not an easy task for traditional search systems targeting natural languages to deal with them. We propose a similarity search method for mathematical equations that is particularly adapted to the tree structures expressed by MathML based on this background. The similarity search system helps users acquire additional knowledge, discover concealed relationships to different fields, and compensate for some false recognition. Given an equation as a query, most of the conventional mathematical search systems return corresponding equations that exactly match the query. Contrarily, our proposed system makes it possible to return similar equations by measuring the similarity using tree-matching techniques and also by reforming the structure of Content-based MathML. In this paper, we examine our proposed techniques through preliminary experimentation using a prototype search system, and show this techniques’ effectiveness based on some conditions requested by the user.