  Identifying mathematical relations expressed in text is essential to
understanding a broad range of natural language text from election reports, to
financial news, to sport commentaries to mathematical word problems. This paper
focuses on identifying and understanding mathematical relations described
within a single sentence. We introduce the problem of Equation Parsing -- given
a sentence, identify noun phrases which represent variables, and generate the
mathematical equation expressing the relation described in the sentence. We
introduce the notion of projective equation parsing and provide an efficient
algorithm to parse text to projective equations. Our system makes use of a high
precision lexicon of mathematical expressions and a pipeline of structured
predictors, and generates correct equations in $70\%$ of the cases. In $60\%$
of the time, it also identifies the correct noun phrase $\rightarrow$ variables
mapping, significantly outperforming baselines. We also release a new annotated
dataset for task evaluation.
