Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents
Lukas Blecher Guillem Cucurull Thomas Scialom Robert Stojnic
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.