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International Conference on Intelligent Computer Mathematics

CICM 2017: Intelligent Computer Mathematics pp 340–355Cite as

VMEXT: A Visualization Tool for Mathematical Expression Trees

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10383))

Abstract

Mathematical expressions can be represented as a tree consisting of terminal symbols, such as identifiers or numbers (leaf nodes), and functions or operators (non-leaf nodes). Expression trees are an important mechanism for storing and processing mathematical expressions as well as the most frequently used visualization of the structure of mathematical expressions. Typically, researchers and practitioners manually visualize expression trees using general-purpose tools. This approach is laborious, redundant, and error-prone. Manual visualizations represents a user’s notion of what the markup of an expression should be, but not necessarily what the actual markup is. This paper presents VMEXT – a free and open source tool to directly visualize expression trees from parallel . VMEXT simultaneously visualizes the presentation elements and the semantic structure of mathematical expressions to enable users to quickly spot deficiencies in the Content markup that does not affect the presentation of the expression. Identifying such discrepancies previously required reading the verbose and complex markup. VMEXT also allows one to visualize similar and identical elements of two expressions. Visualizing expression similarity can support developers in designing retrieval approaches and enable improved interaction concepts for users of mathematical information retrieval systems. We demonstrate VMEXT’s visualizations in two web-based applications. The first application presents the visualizations alone. The second application shows a possible integration of the visualizations in systems for mathematical knowledge management and mathematical information retrieval. The application converts input to parallel , computes basic similarity measures for mathematical expressions, and visualizes the results using VMEXT.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.w3.org/Math/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.citeplag.org.

  3. 3.

    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mathoid.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/zorkow/speech-rule-engine.

  5. 5.

    http://vmext.formulasearchengine.com.

  6. 6.

    http://vmext-demo.formulasearchengine.com.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ludwig Goohsen and Stefan Kaufhold for their support in developing VMEXT. Furthermore, we thank the Wikimedia Foundation for providing a server to run the VMEXT demo.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Konstanz, Box 76, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Moritz Schubotz, Norman Meuschke, Thomas Hepp & Bela Gipp

  2. Applied and Computational Mathematics Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899-8910, USA

    Howard S. Cohl

Authors
  1. Moritz Schubotz
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  2. Norman Meuschke
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  3. Thomas Hepp
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  4. Howard S. Cohl
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  5. Bela Gipp
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Moritz Schubotz , Norman Meuschke , Thomas Hepp , Howard S. Cohl or Bela Gipp .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Herman Geuvers

  2. Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Matthew England

  3. National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Osman Hasan

  4. Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Florian Rabe

  5. FIZ Karlsruhe, Berlin, Germany

    Olaf Teschke

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Schubotz, M., Meuschke, N., Hepp, T., Cohl, H.S., Gipp, B. (2017). VMEXT: A Visualization Tool for Mathematical Expression Trees. In: Geuvers, H., England, M., Hasan, O., Rabe, F., Teschke, O. (eds) Intelligent Computer Mathematics. CICM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10383. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62075-6_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62075-6_24

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62074-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62075-6

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