Extracting Context of Math Formulae Contained inside Scientific Documents

Abstract

A math formula present inside a scientific document is often preceded by its textual description, which is commonly referred to as the context of formula. Annotating context to the formula enriches its semantics, and consequently impacts the retrieval of mathematical contents from scientific documents. Also, with a considerable surety, a context can be assumed to be one of the Noun Phrases (NPs) of the sentence in which formula occurs. However, the presence of several different misleading NPs in the sentence necessitates extraction of an NP, which is more precise to the formula than the rest. Although a fair number of methods are developed for precise context extraction, it can be fascinating to prospect other competent techniques which can further their performances. To this end, this paper discusses implementation of an automated context extraction system, which follows certain heuristics in assigning weights to different candidate NPs, and tune those weights using a development set comprising annotated formulae. The implemented system significantly outperforms nearest noun and sentence–pattern based methods on the ground of F–score.