A novel mathematical formula for retrieval algorithm

A method is proposed to retrieve mathematical formula in LaTeX documents. Firstly, we represent the retrieved mathematical formula by binary tree according to its LaTeX description, normalize the structure of the binary tree, and obtain the structure code and then search the mathematical formula table that is named by the structure code and the formula elements of the first two levels of the binary tree in the mathematical formula database. If the table exists, then we search the normalizing variable name preorder traversing sequence of the binary tree in the table and display the document information that contain the mathematical formula. The experimental results show that the algorithm realizes the retrieval of mathematical formula in LaTeX documents and has higher retrieval precision and faster retrieval speed. © 2014 Yuping Qin et al.