A math-aware search engine for math question answering system

Abstract

We propose a math-aware search engine that is capable of handling both textual keywords as well as mathematical expressions. Our math feature extraction and representation framework captures the semantics of math expressions via a Finite State Machine model. We adapt the passive aggressive online learning binary classifier as the ranking model. We benchmarked our approach against three classical information retrieval (IR) strategies on math documents crawled from Math Overflow, a well-known online math question answering system. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can perform better than other methods by more than 9%.