An Improved Indexing and Matching Method for Mathematical Expressions Based on Inter-Relevant Successive Tree

Abstract

In recent years, a growing number of math contents are available on the Web. When conventional search engines deal with mathematical expressions, the two-dimensional structure of mathematical expressions is lost, which results in a low performance of math retrieval. While the retrieval technology specifically designed for mathematical expressions is not mature currently. Aiming at these problems, an improved mathematical expression indexing and matching method was proposed through employing full text index method to deal with the two-dimensional structure of mathematical expressions. Firstly, through the fully consideration of LaTeX formulae' characteristics, a feature representation method of mathematical expressions and a clustering method of feature keywords were put forward. Then, an improved inter-relevant successive trees index model was applied to the construction of the mathematical expression index, in which the cluster algorithm of mathematical expression features was employed to solve the problem of the quantity growth of the trees in processing large amount of formulae. Finally, the matching algorithms of mathematical expressions were given which provide four query modes called exact matching, compatible matching, sub-expression matching and fuzzy matching. In browser/server mode, 110027 formulae were used as experimental samples. The index file size was 29.02 Mb. The average time of retrieval was 1.092 seconds. The experimental result shows the effectiveness of the method.