Chinese Spelling Text Generation of Mathematical Formulas

Recently, speech assistants have brought convenience to our lives from many aspects. In the education field, speech assistants can also help teachers to reduce their burdens. However, there is no suitable solution to synthesize speeches for mathematical formulas although there have been lots of good techniques for text-to-speech (TTS) in the general domain. One possible solution is that we can convert mathematical formulas expressed in the LaTeX format to spelling texts and synthesize them into speech. In this paper, we investigated text generation methods that translate mathematical formulas in LaTex into Chinese spelling texts. For this purpose, we first constructed a parallel corpus of mathematical formulas and Chinese spelling texts, then compared the existing commonly used text generation methods, such as rule-based, Seq2Seq, Transformer and Graph2Seq, and finally proposed a novel model. As far as we know, this is the first study for Chinese spelling text generation of mathematical formulas. Experiment results on the annotated corpus show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the existing commonly used generation models.