TeXBLEU: Automatic Metric for Evaluate LaTeX Format

LaTeX is highly suited to creating documents with special formatting, particularly in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, and computer science. Despite the increasing use of mathematical expressions in LaTeX format with language models, there are no evaluation metrics for evaluating them. In this study, we propose TeXBLEU, an evaluation metric tailored for mathematical expressions in LaTeX format, based on the n-gram-based BLEU metric that is widely used for translation tasks. The proposed TeXBLEU includes a predefined tokenizer trained on the arXiv paper dataset and a finetuned embedding model. It also considers the positional embedding of tokens. Simultaneously, TeXBLEU compares tokens based on n-grams and computes the score using exponentiation of a logarithmic sum, similar to the original BLEU. Experimental results show that TeXBLEU outperformed traditional evaluation metrics such as BLEU, Rouge, CER, and WER when compared to human evaluation data on the test dataset of the MathBridge dataset, which contains 1,000 data points. The average correlation coefficient with human evaluation was 0.71, which is an improvement of 87% compared with BLEU, which had the highest correlation with human evaluation data among the existing metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/KyuDan1/TeXBLEU.

MathBridge: A Large Corpus Dataset for Translating Spoken Mathematical Expressions into $LaTeX$ Formulas for Improved Readability

Understanding sentences that contain mathematical expressions in text form poses significant challenges. To address this, the importance of converting these expressions into a compiled formula is highlighted. For instance, the expression ``x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a'' from automatic speech recognition (ASR) is more readily comprehensible when displayed as a compiled formula $x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$. To develop a text-to-formula conversion system, we can break down the process into text-to-LaTeX and LaTeX-to-formula conversions, with the latter managed by various existing LaTeX engines. However, the former approach has been notably hindered by the severe scarcity of text-to-LaTeX paired data, which presents a significant challenge in this field. In this context, we introduce MathBridge, the first extensive dataset for translating mathematical spoken expressions into LaTeX, to establish a robust baseline for future research on text-to-LaTeX translation. MathBridge comprises approximately 23 million LaTeX formulas paired with the corresponding spoken English expressions. Through comprehensive evaluations, including fine-tuning and testing with data, we discovered that MathBridge significantly enhances the capabilities of pretrained language models for text-to-LaTeX translation. Specifically, for the T5-large model, the sacreBLEU score increased from 4.77 to 46.8, demonstrating substantial enhancement. Our findings indicate the need for a new metric, specifically for text-to-LaTeX conversion evaluations.