2021/09/20 by Suyu Ma, Ma, Suyu, Chunyang Chen +5
Computer Science · #Algorithm #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Encoder #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Inference #Markup language #Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing #Programming language #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Stack (abstract data type) #Topic Modeling #World Wide Web #XML #cs.HC #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2109.09343
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
arxiv created 2021/09/20 · openalex publication_date 2021/09/20 · arxiv updated 2021/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.