SARCH: Multimodal Search for Archaeological Archives

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a multi-modal search system designed to search old archaeological books and reports. This corpus is digitally available as scanned PDFs, but varies widely in the quality of scans. Our pipeline, designed for multi-modal archaeological documents, extracts and indexes text, images (classified into maps, photos, layouts, and others), and tables. We evaluated different retrieval strategies, including keyword-based search, embedding- based models, and a hybrid approach that selects optimal results from both modalities. We report and analyze our preliminary results and discuss future work in this exciting vertical.