MathAssist: A Handwritten Mathematical Expression Autocomplete Technique

Writing and editing mathematical expressions with complicated structures in computer system is difficult and time-consuming. To address this, we proposed MathAssist, a mathematical expression autocomplete technique that recommends full formulas in real-time based on the user's input strokes. Our technique identifies user's input purpose by matching the structure of the current user input to the structure of formulas in a database. To facilitate such process, we propose a novel tree-based formalization to represent formula. In comparison to a mathematical expression recognition algorithm (SRD) and a commercial MicroSoft Ink Equation (InkEqu), our approach outperformed both of them on task completion time (reduced by 37.14% and 37.58%) and accuracy (32.78% and 10.55% higher). We also discuss our findings in using autocomplete to assist formula editing.