Wikimirs: a Mathematical Information Retrieval System for Wikipedia
Authors | Xuan Hu Liangcai Gao Xiaoyan Lin Zhi Tang Xiaofan Lin Josef B. Baker |
|---|---|
Publication date | 2013 |
DOI | 10.1145/2467696.2467699 |
Links | Original |
Wikimirs: a Mathematical Information Retrieval System for Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2013, written by Xuan Hu, Liangcai Gao, Xiaoyan Lin, Zhi Tang, Xiaofan Lin and Josef B. Baker.
Overview
Mathematical formulae in structural formats such as MathML and LaTeX are becoming increasingly available. Moreover, repositories and websites, including ArXiv and Wikipedia, and growing numbers of digital libraries use these structural formats to present mathematical formulae. This presents an important new and challenging area of research, namely Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR). In this paper, authors propose WikiMirs, a tool to facilitate mathematical formula retrieval in Wikipedia. WikiMirs is aimed at searching for similar mathematical formulae based upon both textual and spatial similarities, using a new indexing and matching model developed for layout structures. A hierarchical generalization technique is proposed to generate sub-trees from presentation trees of mathematical formulae, and similarity is calculated based upon matching at different levels of these trees. Experimental results show that WikiMirs can efficiently support sub-structure matching and similarity matching of mathematical formulae. Moreover, WikiMirs obtains both higher accuracy and better ranked results over Wikipedia in comparison to Wikipedia Search and Egomath. Authors conclude that WikiMirs provides a new, alternative, and hopefully better service for users to search mathematical expressions within Wikipedia.
