Goal

Mathematical formulae are important means of dissemination and communication of scientific information. They are not only used for numerical calculation but also for clarifying definitions or disambiguating explanations that are written in natural language. The NTCIR Math Task aims to explore search methods tailored to mathematical content through the design of suitable search tasks and the construction of evaluation datasets.

Despite the importance of mathematical modeling and analysis in many scientific disciplines, most of the contemporary retrieval systems do not facilitate users’ access to mathematical expressions in target scientific documents. Researchers that are eager to work on this problem are faced with two major obstacles. First, there exists only a few readily available resources with mathematical structured information. Second, there are neither carefully designed tasks nor established evaluation methods for mathematical content access. With this background in mind, the NTCIR Math Task pushes forward the establishment of new challenges in mathematical information retrieval by providing shared datasets and a common evaluation platform to interested researchers.