Parsing and Disambiguation of Symbolic Mathematics in the Naproche System

The Naproche system is a system for linguistically analysing and proof-checking mathematical texts written in a controlled natural language. The aim is to have an input language that is as close as possible to the language that mathematicians actually use when writing textbooks or papers. Mathematical texts consist of a combination of natural language and symbolic mathematics, with symbolic mathematics obeying its own syntactic rules. We discuss the difficulties that a program for parsing and disambiguating symbolic mathematics must face and present how these difficulties have been tackled in the Naproche system. One of these difficulties is the fact that information provided in the preceding context – including information provided in natural language – can influence the way a symbolic expression has to be disambiguated.