Why TeX math search is more relevant now than ever

Petr Sojka
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

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TeX is around 30 years old, and was conceived and written before the advent of MathML, not to mention the Internet. At that time the idea of indexing and searching mathematics was just a futuristic idea. When people jumped on the Google bandwagon, it was predicted that old technologies such as TeX mark-up for math would disappear in time (it is not used for tokenization and indexing properly). The advent of the Internet and \acro{W3C} brought mark-up and global search to the attention of the public. Somehow it was acceptable again. The recent move to the semantic search and MathML has brought renewed attention to the need of unambiguous canonical math representation in texts.

As part of the project of building the European Digital Mathematics Library (\url{http://www.eudml.eu}) we have designed and implemented a math search engine, \acro{MI}a\acro{S} (\url{http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/eudml/mias}). It currently indexes and searches in more than 160,000,000 formulae originally written by authors in TeX in their scientific papers. We will present the system and will discuss the ways towards global math search engine based on the TeX math notation.