Math Indexer and Searcher under the Hood: History and Development of a Winning Strategy

Abstract

This paper describes and summarizes experiences of Masaryk University team MIRMU with the mathematical search performed for the NTCIR pilot Math Task. Our approach is the similarity search based on MathML Canonicalization and second generation of scalable full text search engine Math Indexer and Searcher (MIaS) with attested state-of-the-art information retrieval techniques. The capability of MIaS system in terms of the math query notation, normalization, combining math with textual query tokens was deployed by submitting multiple runs with four query notations provided, and with results merged from multiple queries. The analysis of the evaluation results shows that the system performs best using TeX queries that are translated and canonicalized to Content MathML.