A User Study on Mathematical Information Retrieval (MIR)

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A User Study on Mathematical Information
Retrieval (MIR)

• By Zhao Jin

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Outline

• Introduction Motivation
• Findings from the Study
• Projected Directions for Future Research
• Future Work
• Conclusion

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Introduction Motivation

• Rapid Growth of Math Material Collection
• Mature of Mathematical Expression Recognition
  Technology
• Prevalence of Math Authoring Tools
• How to effectively search through such
  collections?
• Additional Medium Mathematical Expressions
• Traditional Text Retrieval Technique may not be
  applicable

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Introduction Motivation

• Limited literature in the domain
• Two workshop so far
• Few papers and working systems
• Focus on supporting searching for mathematical
  expressions
• Is this the correct focus?
• User study in MIR
• Interviews with students/professors in the Math
  department

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Findings from the Study

• The Current Approaches for Searching
• The Users Needs
• The Available Resources

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The Current Approaches for Searching

• Keyword Search
• Fast Available
• Inaccurate, Disorganized, Prior Knowledge
  Required
• Browsing
• Highly organized, Digested
• Time-consuming
• Consulting an Expert
• Effective
• Not always available

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The Users needs

• Information need
• For Learning/Teaching
• Definition, Exact form, Variations, Derivation,
  Explanation, Slides, Tutorial
• For Research
• Papers
• System Requirement
• Accuracy
• Expression input not essential

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The Available Resources

• Web
• Huge but disorganized
• Keyword search
• Book/Paper Collections
• Categorized documents
• Browsing and controlled access points
• Encyclopedia
• Categorized information
• Browsing and keyword Search
• Experts
• Intelligent
• Question in Natural Language

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Projected Directions for Future Research

• Collect information from multiple resources
• Categorize and present information in a organized
  manner
• Determine the relevance between
• Two Mathematical Expressions
• Text and Mathematical Expression

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Future Work

• More Interview
• Conference Submission
• Corpus Collection
• Experiment

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Conclusion

• User Study on MIR
• Findings from the Study
• The Current Approaches
• The Users Needs
• The Available Resources
• Projected Directions for Future Research
• Future Work