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In this paper, we give a brief survey of the difficulties in handling the syntax of mathematical expressions in Universal Dependencies, focusing on examples from English language corpora. We first examine the prevalence and current handling of mathematical expressions in UD corpora. We then examine several strategies for how to approach the handling of syntactic dependencies for such expressions: as multi-word expressions, as a domain appropriate for code-switching, or as approximate to other types of natural language. Ultimately, we argue that mathematical expressions should primarily be analyzed as natural language, and we offer recommendations for the treatment of basic mathematical expressions as analogous to English natural language.

ACL 2023

Difficulties in Handling Mathematical Expressions in Universal Dependencies

mathematical expressions

syntactic annotation

dependency relations

corpus linguistics

universal dependencies

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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Within the research presented in this article, we created a new question answering benchmark database for Hungarian called MILQA. When creating the dataset, we basically followed the principles of the English SQuAD 2.0, however, like in some more recent English question answering datasets, we introduced a number of innovations beyond SQuAD: e.g., yes/no-questions, list-like answers consisting of several text spans, long answers, questions requiring calculation and other question types where you cannot simply copy the answer from the text. For all these non-extractive question types, the pragmatically adequate form of the answer was also added to make the training of generative models possible.

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Difficulties in Handling Mathematical Expressions in Universal Dependencies

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