Week 1: Brainstorm the scope of project

From Jason Chiau:

How do human find unknown notations?

I will find the nearest clickable link and click on it hoping it can take me one step closer to the answer. By doing this recursively, I can find my answer most of the time.

What if I solely let computer imitate this process?

I can traversal Wikipedia, make a subset with the notation that I don't understand and then do a PageRank or DFS.

What is the problem in doing this?

How can I generate core explanation from the page I find.
What if the target is not textual searchable?
What if the same notation can refer to completely different things?
If so, how can I take context into consideration?
If the search term is a math formula, what is the programmable representation of it? latex? image?
How to deal with different descriptions of the same problem? NLP -> search -> NLG?
If we are going to do the search, is it pre-indexed or dynamic?

From Jenny:

I think we can start from parsing latex files since it's pretty formatted. There are two sourses of math symbols/equations:

symbols that are defined within the file: we could do a lookup?
symbols that are convention: may need to search on Wikipedia -> PageRank (like Jason mentioned)

In terms of the length of equation we are targeting, I think we could start with single symbols first. Because NLG for math equation may not be as straight forward as CSS description in the paper.

I did literature review, but it seems there is not any math equation explanation software yet. However, I did find some math parsers (more like math calculator) online:

http://mathparser.org/mxparser-tutorial/using-internal-help/
https://github.com/mparlak/Flee
http://www.antlr.org/ (this one is mentioned in the paper, I think it's pretty relevant, just put it here)

These only supports a fix set of operations, so I assume they have a pre-built classes and functions. But we can learn about how they interpret the math equations.

From Lysia:

What could be leveraged from Tutoron?

Routine

Detection of math equations/notation
Parse detected region
Explain by traversing the parse structure

Design guideline

Reappropriate existing tool/parsers like mentioned by Jenny
Inspect large-scale math equations in the field ahead of time to mine common usage

Deliverable

web app

Scope

Where to start? Papers? Wikipedia page?

latex? pdf?
Either papers or Wikipedia page, we should pick a field, e.g Neural Network related paper/wiki pages

Explanation of a simple math notation or explanation of an entire equation?

e.g in Tutoron, it achieved both: explain each argument for wget, and also explain the purpose of the entire line of code

Week 1