MIaS: Math-Aware Retrieval in Digital Mathematical Libraries

Digital mathematical libraries (DMLs) such as arXiv, Numdam, and EuDML contain mainly documents from STEM fields, where mathematical formulae are often more important than text for understanding. Conventional information retrieval (IR) systems are unable to represent formulae and they are therefore...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Main Authors: Sojka Petr, Růžička Michal, Novotný Vít
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery 2018
Subjects:
DML
Online Access:https://is.muni.cz/publication/1430425
https://doi.org/10.1145/3269206.3269233
Description
Summary:Digital mathematical libraries (DMLs) such as arXiv, Numdam, and EuDML contain mainly documents from STEM fields, where mathematical formulae are often more important than text for understanding. Conventional information retrieval (IR) systems are unable to represent formulae and they are therefore ill-suited for math information retrieval (MIR). To fill the gap, we have developed, and open-sourced the MIaS MIR system. MIaS is based on the full-text search engine Apache Lucene. On top of text retrieval, MIaS also incorporates a set of tools for preprocessing mathematical formulae. We describe the design of the system and present speed, and quality evaluation results. We show that MIaS is both efficient, and effective, as evidenced by our victory in the NTCIR-11 Math-2 task.