MIaS: Math-Aware Retrieval in Digital Mathematical Libraries

• 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: Math Information Retrieval; DML; EuDML; Digital Mathematical Libraries; vyhledávání matematiky; digitální matematické knihovny
• Online Access: https://is.muni.cz/publication/1430425; https://doi.org/10.1145/3269206.3269233

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.