# Extracting Definienda in Mathematical Scholarly Articles with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12448/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional LSTM-CRF Models for Sequence Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01991/) (2015)
- [NaturalProofs: Mathematical Theorem Proving in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01112/) (2021)
- [Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14237/) (2020)
- [Document-Level Definition Detection in Scholarly Documents: Existing Models, Error Analyses, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05129/) (2020)
- [Modular Multimodal Machine Learning for Extraction of Theorems and Proofs in Long Scientific Documents (Extended Version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09047/) (2023)
- [ArGoT: A Glossary of Terms extracted from the arXiv](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02801/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider automatically identifying the defined term within a mathematical definition from the text of an academic article. Inspired by the development of transformer-based natural language processing applications, we pose the problem as (a) a token-level classification task using fine-tuned pre-trained transformers; and (b) a question-answering task using a generalist large language model (GPT). We also propose a rule-based approach to build a labeled dataset from the LATEX source of papers. Experimental results show that it is possible to reach high levels of precision and recall using either recent (and expensive) GPT 4 or simpler pre-trained models fine-tuned on our task.