PaperMage: A Unified Toolkit for Processing, Representing, and Manipulating Visually-Rich Scientific Documents

Abstract

Despite growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) models to the scholarly domain, scientific documents remain challenging to work with. They're often in difficult-to-use PDF formats, and the ecosystem of models to process them is fragmented and incomplete. We introduce papermage, an opensource Python toolkit for analyzing and processing visually-rich, structured scientific documents. papermage offers clean and intuitive abstractions for seamlessly representing and manipulating both textual and visual document elements. papermage achieves this by integrating disparate state-of-the-art NLP and CV models into a unified framework, and provides turnkey recipes for common scientific document processing use-cases. papermage has powered multiple research prototypes of AI applications over scientific documents, along with Semantic Scholar's large-scale production system for processing millions of PDFs.