Parsing TeX into mathematics

Fateman.

Communication, storage, transmission, and searching of complex materialhas become increasingly important. Mathematical computing in adistributed environment is also becoming more plausible as libraries and computing facilities are connected with each other and with user facilities. TEX is a well-known mathematical typesetting language, and from the display perspective it might seem that it could be used for communication between computer systems as well as an intermediate form for theresults of OCR (optical character recognition) of mathematical expressions. There are flaws in this reasoning, since exchanging mathematical information requires a system to parse and semantically “understand” theTEX, even if it is “ambiguous” notationally. A program we developed can handle 43% of 10,740 TEX formulas in a well-known table of integrals. Weexpect that a higher success rate can be achieved easily.