English

Neural Machine Translation for Mathematical Formulae

Computation and Language 2023-05-29 v1 Symbolic Computation Applications

Abstract

We tackle the problem of neural machine translation of mathematical formulae between ambiguous presentation languages and unambiguous content languages. Compared to neural machine translation on natural language, mathematical formulae have a much smaller vocabulary and much longer sequences of symbols, while their translation requires extreme precision to satisfy mathematical information needs. In this work, we perform the tasks of translating from LaTeX to Mathematica as well as from LaTeX to semantic LaTeX. While recurrent, recursive, and transformer networks struggle with preserving all contained information, we find that convolutional sequence-to-sequence networks achieve 95.1% and 90.7% exact matches, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.16433,
  title  = {Neural Machine Translation for Mathematical Formulae},
  author = {Felix Petersen and Moritz Schubotz and Andre Greiner-Petter and Bela Gipp},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16433},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Published at ACL 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:46:46.072Z