  Mathematical formulae represent complex semantic information in a concise
form. Especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,
mathematical formulae are crucial to communicate information, e.g., in
scientific papers, and to perform computations using computer algebra systems.
Enabling computers to access the information encoded in mathematical formulae
requires machine-readable formats that can represent both the presentation and
content, i.e., the semantics, of formulae. Exchanging such information between
systems additionally requires conversion methods for mathematical
representation formats. We analyze how the semantic enrichment of formulae
improves the format conversion process and show that considering the textual
context of formulae reduces the error rate of such conversions. Our main
contributions are: (1) providing an openly available benchmark dataset for the
mathematical format conversion task consisting of a newly created test
collection, an extensive, manually curated gold standard and task-specific
evaluation metrics; (2) performing a quantitative evaluation of
state-of-the-art tools for mathematical format conversions; (3) presenting a
new approach that considers the textual context of formulae to reduce the error
rate for mathematical format conversions. Our benchmark dataset facilitates
future research on mathematical format conversions as well as research on many
problems in mathematical information retrieval. Because we annotated and linked
all components of formulae, e.g., identifiers, operators and other entities, to
Wikidata entries, the gold standard can, for instance, be used to train methods
for formula concept discovery and recognition. Such methods can then be applied
to improve mathematical information retrieval systems, e.g., for semantic
formula search, recommendation of mathematical content, or detection of
mathematical plagiarism.
