Narrative Structure of Mathematical Texts

Abstract

There are many styles for the narrative structure of a mathematical document. Each mathematician has its own conventions and traditions about labeling portions of texts (e.g., chapter, section, theorem or proof ) and identifying statements according to their logical importance (e.g., theorem is more important than lemma). Such narrative/structuring labels guide the reader’s navigation of the text and form the key components in the reasoning structure of the theory reflected in the text.

We present in this paper a method to computerise the narrative structure of a text which includes the relationships between labeled text entities. These labels and relations are input by the user on top of their natural language text. This narrative structure is then automatically analysed to check its consistency. This automatic analysis consists of two phases: (1) checking the correct usage of labels and relations (i.e., that a ”proof” justifies a ”theorem” but cannot justify an ”axiom”) and (2) checking that the logical precedences in the document are self-consistent.

The development of this method was driven by the experience of computerising a number of mathematical documents (covering different authoring styles). We illustrate how such computerised narrative structure could be used for further manipulations, i.e. to build a skeleton of a formal document in a formal system like Mizar, Coq or Isabelle.