Extracting Textual Descriptions of Mathematical Expressions in Scientific Papers

Abstract

Mathematical concepts and formulations play a fundamental role in many scientific domains. As such, the use of mathematical expressions represents a promising method of interlinking scientific papers. The purpose of this study is to provide guidelines for annotating and detecting natural language descriptions of mathematical expressions, enabling the semantic enrichment of mathematical information in scientific papers. Under the proposed approach, we first manually annotate descriptions of mathematical expressions and assess the coverage of several types of textual span: fixed context window, apposition, minimal noun phrases, and noun phrases. We then developed a method for automatic description extraction, whereby the problem was formulated as a binary classification by pairing each mathematical expression with its description candidates and classifying the pairs as correct or incorrect. Support vector machines (SVMs) with several different features were developed and evaluated for the classification task. Experimental results showed that an SVM model that uses all noun phrases delivers the best performance, achieving an F1-score of 62.25% against the 41.47% of the baseline (nearest noun) method.