23

Semantic Search over 9 Million Mathematical Theorems

Luke Alexander
Eric Leonen
Sophie Szeto
Artemii Remizov
Ignacio Tejeda
Giovanni Inchiostro
Vasily Ilin
Main:9 Pages
6 Figures
Bibliography:3 Pages
15 Tables
Appendix:12 Pages
Abstract

Searching for mathematical results remains difficult: most existing tools retrieve entire papers, while mathematicians and theorem-proving agents often seek a specific theorem, lemma, or proposition that answers a query. While semantic search has seen rapid progress, its behavior on large, highly technical corpora such as research-level mathematical theorems remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce and study semantic theorem retrieval at scale over a unified corpus of 9.29.2 million theorem statements extracted from arXiv and seven other sources, representing the largest publicly available corpus of human-authored, research-level theorems. We represent each theorem with a short natural-language description as a retrieval representation and systematically analyze how representation context, language model choice, embedding model, and prompting strategy affect retrieval quality. On a curated evaluation set of theorem-search queries written by professional mathematicians, our approach substantially improves both theorem-level and paper-level retrieval compared to existing baselines, demonstrating that semantic theorem search is feasible and effective at web scale. The theorem search tool is available at \href{this https URL}{this link}, and the dataset is available at \href{this https URL}{this link}.

View on arXiv
Comments on this paper