Making Presentation Math Computable: Proposing a Context Sensitive Approach for Translating LaTeX to Computer Algebra Systems

Scientists increasingly rely on computer algebra systems and digital mathematical libraries to compute, validate, or experiment with mathematical formulae. However, the focus in digital mathematical libraries and scientific documents often lies more on an accurate presentation of the formulae rather than providing uniform access to the semantic information. But, presentational math formats do not provide exclusive access to the underlying semantic meanings. One has to derive the semantic information from the context. As a consequence, the workflow of experimenting and publishing in the Sciences often includes time-consuming, error-prone manual conversions between presentational and computational math formats. As a contribution to improve this workflow, we propose a context-sensitive approach that extracts semantic information from a given context, embeds the information into the given input, and converts the semantically enhanced expressions to computer algebra systems.