Re: mathml to plain text | audio?

Hi Andreas,

True. MathML Content Markup seems at first better. However there are 2 open
issues:

(1) MathML Content Markup only covers basic math. The operator's dictionary
and support is not very big. OpenMath is doing a better job on that.
(2) Who uses MathML Content Markup in WebPages? Noone. The major
contribution on the web is based on Presentation-Markup. So seems to me that
a program that speaks MathML needs to understand Presentation Markup too.

Concluding the following:

1. A program that does MathML Audio Rendering needs to support both Content
and Presentation Markup.
2. By parsing Presentation and interpreting the markup we are in deed doing
a kind of Presentation to Content Markup (which is not an easy task, and not
being implemented yet), and then converting the meaning of the mathematical
expression into plain text and therefore in audio using a TTS.

Regards,

Helder


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andreas Strotmann" <Strotmann@rrz.uni-koeln.de>
To: "Helder Ferreira" <hfilipe@fe.up.pt>
Cc: <David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk>; <www-math@w3.org>; "Diamantino Freitas"
<dfreitas@fe.up.pt>
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: mathml to plain text | audio?


> Note that even though Aster is used to render LaTeX, T.V. Raman's
> dissertation makes it clear that his system does an enormous amount of
> work to recognize the logical structure of the formulas it reads.
>
> If I understand T.V.Raman correctly, for text / audio rendering,
> MathML-Content should therefore be a much better-quality input than
> MathML-Presentation, and I suspect that MathML-Presentation text/audio
> rendering should really be done as a two-phase process that first does
> MathML-Presentation to MathML-Content recognition.
>
>   -- Andreas
>
> Helder Ferreira wrote:
>
> > You can also look into the T.V. Raman's work about ASTER.-
> > http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/aster/demo.html .
> > However ASTER works for Latex documents. Nevertheless, you can transform
> > Latex to MathML (see
http://www.orcca.on.ca/MathML/texmml/textomml.html ).
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----- 
> > From: <David.Pawson@rnib.org.uk>
> > To: <www-math@w3.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 12:52 PM
> > Subject: mathml to plain text | audio?
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >>www.daisy.org is a group of organisations who produce smil based
> >>'talking books'. Synchronised text and audio for blind and partially
> >>sighted people.
> >>
> >>We are starting to look at incorporating mathml into our schema,
> >>and that's fine for producing braille, just hard work.
> >>
> >>However, for 'spoken' math(s), it presents a problem  of automation.
> >>For more complex stuff, human readers tend to make mistakes, hence
> >>synthetic speech is often used.
> >>
> >>Put simply, mathml isn't 'readable' in its XML format (my view :-).
> >>Certainly if serialised it wouldn't sound very good via a TTS engine.
> >>
> >>I'm informed others have looked at mathml to 'plain text' transforms,
> >> perhaps with paragraph level formatting.
> >>I'm wondering if any such transforms are available open source, or could
> >>be licenced to the daisy group for our readers?
> >>
> >>Any pointers appreciated.
> >>
> >>Regards DaveP.
> >>www.rnib.org.uk
> >>
> >>Not subscribed to this list, so please copy me in.
> >>
> >>
> >>**** snip here *****
> >>
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Received on Tuesday, 1 June 2004 09:51:55 UTC