What is Mathematical Retrieval

In recent years, the number of computer-aided educational softwares in mathematics field has been increasing. Currently, there are some research prototypes and systems assisting finding mathematical problems. However, when finding appropriate mathematical expressions, most of these systems only support mechanisms to search expression in a strict exact manner, or search some similar problems based on wildcard, not on the similarity of expression structures and semantic meanings. Such mechanisms restrict users significantly from achieving meaningful and accurate search results of mathematical expressions. In this chapter, we introduce a mathematical retrieval system that helps mathematics learners self-study effectively. The most important module in our system is the math-retrieving system module, which received the analyzed problems submitted from users, retrieves solutions from similar stored problems and ranks the retrieved problems to users. To fulfill these requirements, we have researched and proposed some advanced mathematical retrieval and mathematical ranking techniques. Experiments have shown that our proposed techniques highly suitable for mathematical retrieval as they outperformed the techniques used in typical document retrieval system