Evaluating Methodologies on Deep Understanding of Mathematical Formulas in Technical Documents

Mathematical formulas (MF) constitute a crucial part of technical documents and have drawn the attention of the researcher community recently. In their vast majority, researchers focus on their recognition, retrieval, and structure. Another aspect of the technical mathematical formulas, that has received less attention over the years, is the extraction of their mathematical features and the automated understanding of what they represent. A substantial progress in the field of technical mathematical formulas understanding could contribute significantly to two related areas: the scientific knowledge management through a better digitalized archive of technical documents, as well as the experimental research of mathematics, through a solid modeling of the technical formulas. The work that follows is a comparative evaluation of the published articles on the deep understanding of mathematical formulas of technical documents to date. During this study, the scientific work at hand is presented and the main approaches on the subject are discussed. As the unaltered detailed implementation of every effort is prohibitively demanding, a set of criteria is defined to help evaluate and compare the completeness of each work. The study ends with the evaluation of each work according to the defined criteria and thoughts on the subject of mathematical formulas understanding.