Discovering Mathematical Objects of Interest—A Study of Mathematical Notations
André Greiner-Petter, Moritz Schubotz, Fabian Müller, Corinna Breitinger, Howard S. Cohl, Akiko Aizawa, Bela Gipp · 2020
Mathematical notation, i.e., the writing system used to communicate concepts in mathematics, encodes valuable information for a variety of information search and retrieval systems. Yet, mathematical notations remain mostly unutilized by today’s systems. In this paper, we present the first in-depth study on the distributions of mathematical notation in two large scientific corpora: the open access arXiv (2.5B mathematical objects) and the mathematical reviewing service for pure and applied mathematics zbMATH (61M mathematical objects). Our study lays a foundation for future research projects on mathematical information retrieval for large scientific corpora. Further, we demonstrate the relevance of our results to a variety of use-cases. For example, to assist semantic extraction systems, to improve scientific search engines, and to facilitate specialized math recommendation systems.