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arXiv · 2109.09343

Latexify Math: Mathematical Formula Markup Revision to Assist Collaborative Editing in Math Q&A Sites

Suyu Ma·Chunyang Chen·Hourieh Khalajzadeh·John Grundy
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Abstract

Collaborative editing questions and answers plays an important role in quality control of Mathematics Stack Exchange which is a math Q&A Site. Our study of post edits in Mathematics Stack Exchange shows that there is a large number of math-related edits about latexifying formulas, revising LaTeX and converting the blurred math formula screenshots to LaTeX sequence. Despite its importance, manually editing one math-related post especially those with complex mathematical formulas is time-consuming and error-prone even for experienced users. To assist post owners and editors to do this editing, we have developed an edit-assistance tool, MathLatexEdit for formula latexification, LaTeX revision and screenshot transcription. We formulate this formula editing task as a translation problem, in which an original post is translated to a revised post. MathLatexEdit implements a deep learning based approach including two encoder-decoder models for textual and visual LaTeX edit recommendation with math-specific inference. The two models are trained on large-scale historical original-edited post pairs and synthesized screenshot-formula pairs. Our evaluation of MathLatexEdit not only demonstrates the accuracy of our model, but also the usefulness of MathLatexEdit in editing real-world posts which are accepted in Mathematics Stack Exchange.

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Suyu Ma, Chunyang Chen, Hourieh Khalajzadeh, John Grundy. 2021-09-20. Latexify Math: Mathematical Formula Markup Revision to Assist Collaborative Editing in Math Q&A Sites. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09343

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