Search mathematical formulas by mathematical formulas

Abstract

Users cannot search information by mathematical formulas as queries in existing search engines. This is because mathematical formulas are not expressed as a sequence of characters. Some formulas are expressed in a complex structure like fractional numbers and index numbers. We present a search engine for MathML objects using the structure of mathematical formulas. The system makes the inverted indices by using the DOM structure of the MathML object. We proposed three types of index. One type is constructed from some paths of the DOM structure and expressed in XPath. The other type is constructed by encoding the nodes in the same level in DOM structure. The third type is a hybrid method of them. This paper describes the experiment conducted to study the effectiveness of those indices. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.