Abstract
In medieval Arabic, no symbols are used to express mathematical problems and solutions. Instead, specific Arabic terms are used to describe mathematical processes. Nevertheless, a close examination of the text styles and how information is encoded into natural language phrases reveals that the notations contain no ambiguity, which makes it possible to formulate the problem and solve it. In this paper, we explore the idea of automatically generating modern symbolic mathematical equations from natural language medieval Arabic Algebra texts. We will describe a simple machine translation system using Rule-based Machine Translation (MT) with Dictionary Approach in order to translate medieval verbal equation to a modern equation. We construct a new dataset from scratch to facilitate our study, as there is no previously published similar dataset. Our system was able to achieve correct translation results for cubic equations with 100% accuracy, and quartic, quintic equations with 96.66% and 94.01%, respectively.