Semantic Representations of Mathematical Expressions in a Continuous Vector Space

Mathematical notation makes up a large portion of STEM literature, yet, finding semantic representations for formulae remains a challenging problem. Because mathematical notation is precise, and its meaning changes significantly with small character shifts, the methods that work for natural text do not necessarily work well for mathematical expressions. In this work, we describe an approach for representing mathematical expressions in a continuous vector space. We use the encoder of a sequence-to-sequence architecture, trained on visually different but mathematically equivalent expressions, to generate vector representations (or embeddings). We compare this approach with an autoencoder and show that the former is better at capturing mathematical semantics. Finally, to expedite future research, we publish a corpus of equivalent transcendental and algebraic expression pairs.