intro.md

Mathematical/Technical Documents form the backbone of the current system that conserves our scientific and technological heritage and makes it accessible to innovation. As such, they constitute one of the biggest investments of our society and form a key resource for future prosperity. 

These documents are rich in structure, non-trivial in content, and currently virtually closed to machine processing due to their inherent complexity, low redundancy and limited distribution. One of the principal problems is the pervasive use of mathematical langauge and notation. 

The *Special Interest group for Math Linguistics* (SIGMathLing) is a forum and resource cooperative for the linguistics of mathematical/technical documents. It [aims at](/objectives/)

1. getting together researchers and application developers interested in maths linguistics to create a critical mass.
2. promoting open licensing of math linguistics resources. 
3. collecting, curating, and internally/externally distributing a set of maths linguistic resources (corpora, lexica, libraries, tools, and benchmarks).

These resources are freely shared among SIGMathLing members even if they cannot be made public for licensing reasons. Members also share results of linguistic analyses to facilitate derived results (... details in the [charter](/charter/)).