Analysis of Mixed Natural and Symbolic Input in Mathematical Dialogs

Discourse in formal domains, such as mathematics, is characterized by a mixture of telegraphic natural language and embedded (semi-)formal symbolic mathematical expressions. We present language phenomena observed in a corpus of dialogs with a simulated tutorial system for proving theorems as evidence for the need for deep syntactic and semantic analysis. We propose an approach to input understanding in this setting. Our goal is a uniform analysis of inputs of different degree of verbalization: ranging from symbolic alone to fully worded mathematical expressions.

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