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Mathematical Expression Extraction from Unstructured Plain Text

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Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11608))

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Abstract

Mathematical expressions are often found embedded inline with unstructured plain text in the web and documents. They can vary from numbers and variable names to average-level mathematical expressions. Traditional rule-based techniques for mathematical expression extraction do not scale well across a wide range of expression types, and are less robust for expressions with slight typos and lexical ambiguities. This research employs sequential, as well as deep learning classifiers to identify mathematical expressions in a given unstructured text. We compare CRF, LSTM, Bi-LSTM with word embeddings, and Bi-LSTM with word and character embeddings. These were trained with a dataset containingĀ 102K tokens andĀ 9K mathematical expressions. Given the relatively small dataset, the CRF model out-performed RNN models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.quora.com/If-A-and-B-are-disjointed-sets-how-can%2Dyou-find-n-A-union-B.

  2. 2.

    The code and data is available here https://github.com/Kulakshi/math-expression-extraction.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/allenai/semeval-2019-task-10.

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Acknowledgment

This research was funded by a Senate Research Committee (SRC) Grant of the University of Moratuwa and LK Domain Registry.

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Correspondence to Kulakshi Fernando .

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Fernando, K., Ranathunga, S., Dias, G. (2019). Mathematical Expression Extraction from Unstructured Plain Text. In: MĆ©tais, E., Meziane, F., Vadera, S., Sugumaran, V., Saraee, M. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11608. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23281-8_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23281-8_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23280-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23281-8

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