Interpretable Representations for Fast and Accurate Retrieval of Mathematical Information

This repository contains PDF and source of the doctoral thesis Interpretable Representations for Fast and Accurate Retrieval of Mathematical Information by Vít Novotný as well as PDF and source of the thesis defense presentation. A recording of the thesis defense is available on YouTube.

Abstract

Mathematicians dream of a digital library of all peer-reviewed math literature ever published. Math information retrieval emerged when it became clear that standard information retrieval techniques used for text documents were inadequate to retrieve math documents from digital mathematical libraries.

Math information retrieval systems use advanced representations of math to ensure fast and accurate retrieval. However, they rarely focus on the interpretability of their representations, which makes the retrieval results difficult to explain to users.

In my thesis, I focus on representations and techniques that can make math information retrieval systems more interpretable: token embeddings, semantic matching techniques, and learning-to-rank techniques. The aim of my thesis is to determine whether these techniques can also make math information retrieval systems more accurate and keep them reasonably fast.

I show that semantic matching techniques based on token embeddings and learning-to-rank techniques can improve the accuracy of math information retrieval systems and can achieve the same speed as non-interpretable systems. I also show the tangible benefits of interpretability.

Citing

To cite my thesis in your work, you can use the following bibliographic entry:

NOVOTNÝ, Vít. Interpretable Representations for Fast and Accurate Retrieval of Mathematical Information [online]. Brno. Available from: https://is.muni.cz/th/o4thd/. Doctoral thesis. Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics. Thesis supervisor Petr SOJKA.

Alternatively, you can also use the following BibLaTeX code:

@thesis{novotny2021interpretable,
  title = {Interpretable Representations for Fast and Accurate
           Retrieval of Mathematical Information},
  author = {Novotný, Vít},
  supervisor = {Sojka, Petr},
  institution = {Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University},
  location = {Brno},
  type = {phdthesis},
  year = 2021,
  url = {https://is.muni.cz/th/o4thd/},
}