Probabilistic mathematical formula recognition using a 2D context-free graph grammar

We present a probabilistic framework for the mathematical expression recognition problem. The developed system is flexible in that its grammar can be extended easily thanks to its graph grammar which eliminates the need for specifying rule precedence. It is also optimal in the sense that all possible interpretations of the expressions are expanded without making early commitments or hard decisions. In this paper, we give an overview of the whole system and describe in detail the graph grammar and the parsing process used in the system, along with some preliminary results on character, structure and expression recognition performances

Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval

We summarize math search engines and search interfaces produced by the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab in recent years, and in particular the min math search interface and the Tangent search engine. Source code for both systems are publicly available. "The Masses" refers to our emphasis on creating systems for mathematical non-experts, who may be looking to define unfamiliar notation, or browse documents based on the visual appearance of formulae rather than their mathematical semantics.Comment: Paper for Invited Talk at 2015 Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (July, Washington DC

ApproXFILTER - an approximative XML filter

Publish/subscribe systems filter published documents and inform their subscribers about documents matching their interests. Recent systems have focussed on documents or messages sent in XML format. Subscribers have to be familiar with the underlying XML format to create meaningful subscriptions. A service might support several providers with slightly differing formats, e.g., several publishers of books. This makes the definition of a successful subscription almost impossible. We propose the use of an approximative language for subscriptions.We introduce the design our ApproXFILTER algorithm for approximative filtering in a pub/sub system. We present the results of our analysis of a prototypical implementation

A Theme-Rewriting Approach for Generating Algebra Word Problems

Texts present coherent stories that have a particular theme or overall setting, for example science fiction or western. In this paper, we present a text generation method called {\it rewriting} that edits existing human-authored narratives to change their theme without changing the underlying story. We apply the approach to math word problems, where it might help students stay more engaged by quickly transforming all of their homework assignments to the theme of their favorite movie without changing the math concepts that are being taught. Our rewriting method uses a two-stage decoding process, which proposes new words from the target theme and scores the resulting stories according to a number of factors defining aspects of syntactic, semantic, and thematic coherence. Experiments demonstrate that the final stories typically represent the new theme well while still testing the original math concepts, outperforming a number of baselines. We also release a new dataset of human-authored rewrites of math word problems in several themes.Comment: To appear EMNLP 201