Scientific knowledge is predominantly stored in books and scientific journals, often in the form of PDFs. However, the PDF format leads to a loss of semantic information, particularly for mathematical expressions. We propose Nougat (Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents), a Visual Transformer model that performs an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task for processing scientific documents into a markup language, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a new dataset of scientific documents. The proposed approach offers a promising solution to enhance the accessibility of scientific knowledge in the digital age, by bridging the gap between human-readable documents and machine-readable text. We release the models and code to accelerate future work on scientific text recognition.
@article{arxiv.2308.13418,
title = {Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents},
author = {Lukas Blecher and Guillem Cucurull and Thomas Scialom and Robert Stojnic},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.13418},
year = {2023}
}