Variable Typing: Assigning Meaning to Variables in Mathematical Text

Yiannos Stathopoulos, Simon Baker, Marek Rei, Simone Teufel


Abstract
Information about the meaning of mathematical variables in text is useful in NLP/IR tasks such as symbol disambiguation, topic modeling and mathematical information retrieval (MIR). We introduce variable typing, the task of assigning one mathematical type (multi-word technical terms referring to mathematical concepts) to each variable in a sentence of mathematical text. As part of this work, we also introduce a new annotated data set composed of 33,524 data points extracted from scientific documents published on arXiv. Our intrinsic evaluation demonstrates that our data set is sufficient to successfully train and evaluate current classifiers from three different model architectures. The best performing model is evaluated on an extrinsic task: MIR, by producing a typed formula index. Our results show that the best performing MIR models make use of our typed index, compared to a formula index only containing raw symbols, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of variable typing.
Anthology ID:
N18-1028
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
303–312
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1028
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1028
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiannos Stathopoulos, Simon Baker, Marek Rei, and Simone Teufel. 2018. Variable Typing: Assigning Meaning to Variables in Mathematical Text. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 303–312, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Variable Typing: Assigning Meaning to Variables in Mathematical Text (Stathopoulos et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1028.pdf
Dataset:
 N18-1028.Datasets.tgz
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/N18-1028.mp4