Re: searching for math

On 8/17/21 4:32 PM, Neil Soiffer wrote:
> Seems like we have reached the same conclusion that now is not the time to try and enhance 
> search in math. We will discuss this further at the meeting this week, but I encourage 
> anyone who disagrees with that feeling to put their thoughts down in email or a position 
> paper and post that well in advance of the meeting so we have time to digest it.

Mostly, yes, but I had wanted to add a few points to the discussion (got sidetracked).

Full-on, genuine Math Search is a certainly a research topic. Several approaches
have been and are being explored: based on presentation or content; based on
converting the math to a special form of text and leveraging text-based search; structured 
based search, etc.  Several math-specific issues crop up: commutativity, some symbols are
essentially anonymous and others aren't (eg. \sin(x) is presumably the "same" as \sin(y),
but f(x) is not the same as g(x)) and so on.  This kind of math search is certainly *not* 
ready for any kind of standardization effort.

However, pretty much all of the accessibility approaches we've been discussing end
up associating names or words with the symbols within a math expression. and this
extra information and disambiguation inevitably must help math search (except perhaps
purely Content MathML based ones).  If only to provide an alttext for the math (if only
it were indexed, sigh).


>     On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 5:54 PM Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu
>     <mailto:soiffer@alum.mit.edu>> wrote:
>         I think the most common math search is to search for some topic to learn about
>         that topic. For example, someone might search for geometric progressions,
>         Fibonacci numbers, or Bessel functions of the second kind. All of these types of
>         searches seem well handled today because the text in documents that discuss them
>         mention those words.

I think you slightly overstate the case here; wouldn't it be better if the "Fibonacci 
numbers" in the formula were recognized as such, just in case it wasn't redundant in the text?

So, it seems to me worth mentioning search as an additional motivation to annotating for 
accessibility, but I don't think that we should propose any specific methods, solutions 
etc.  Other than perhaps lobbying for at least alttext to be indexed :>

bruce


-- 
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/

Received on Tuesday, 17 August 2021 21:49:30 UTC