An ALBERT-based Similarity Measure for Mathematical Answer Retrieval

Mathematical Language Processing (MLP) deals with the automated processing and analysis of mathematical documents and relies heavily on good representations of mathematical symbols and texts. The aim of this work is to explore the modeling capabilities of state-of-the-art unsupervised deep learning methods to create such representations. Therefore, we pre-trained different instances of an ALBERT model on Mathematics StackExchange data and fine-tuned it on the task of Mathematical Answer Retrieval. Our evaluation shows that ALBERT outperforms all previous systems and is on par with current state-of-the-art systems for math retrieval indicating strong capabilities of modeling mathematical posts. This implies that our approach can also be beneficial to various other tasks in MLP such as automatic proof checking or summarization of scientific texts.