LINGUISTIC SUPPORT FOR A RECOGNIZER OF MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSIONS

The present invention provides a new source of information, linguistic models, to improve the accuracy of mathematical recognition. Specifically, the present invention is an extension of linguistic methods to the mathematical domain thereby providing recognition of the artificial language of mathematics in a way analogous to natural language recognition. Parse trees are the basic units of the mathematical language, and a linguistic model for mathematics is a method for assigning a linguistic score to each parse tree. The models are generally created by taking a large body of known text and counting the occurrence of various linguistic events such as word bigrams in that body. The raw counts are modified by smoothing and other algorithms before taking their place as probabilities in the model.