Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents
Authors: name: Lukas Blecher; name: Guillem Cucurull; name: Thomas Scialom; name: Robert Stojnic
Published: 2023-08-25 15:03:36

Abstract: 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.