Utilizing dependency relationships between math expressions in math IR

Current mathematical search systems allow math expressions within a document to be queried using math expressions and keywords. To accept such queries, math search systems must index both math expressions and textual information in documents. Each indexed math expression is usually associated with all the words in its surrounding context within a given window size. However, we found that this context is often ineffective for explaining math expressions in scientific papers. The meaning of an expression is usually defined in the early part of a document, and the meaning of each symbol contained in the expression can be useful for explaining the entire expression. This explanation may not be captured within the context of a math expression, unless we set the context to have a very wide window size. However, widening the window size also increases the proportion of words that are unrelated to the expression. This paper proposes the use of dependency relationships between math expressions to enrich the textual information of each expression. We examine the influence of this enrichment in a math search system. The experimental results show that significantly better precision can be obtained using the enriched textual information rather than the math expressions’ own textual information. This indicates that the enrichment of textual information for each math expression using dependency relationships enhances the math search system.