Mathematical formula recognition using graph grammar

This paper describes current results of Ofr (Optical Formula Recognition), a system for extracting and understanding mathematical expressions in documents. Such a tool could be really useful to be able to re-use knowledge in scientific books which are not available in electronic form. We currently also study use of this system for direct input of formulas with a graphical tablet for computer algebra system softwares. Existing solutions for mathematical recognition have problems to analyze two dimensional expressions like vectors and matrices... This is because they often try to use extended classical grammar to analyze formulas, relatively to baseline. But a lot of mathematical notations do not respect rules for such a parsing and that is the reason why they fail to extend text parsing technic. We investigate graph grammar and graph rewriting as a solution to recognize two dimensional mathematical notations. Graph grammar provide a powerful formalism to describe structural manipulations of multi-dimensional data. The main two problems to solve are ambiguities between rules of grammar (1 for theorems) and construction of graph.