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arXiv · 2511.05667

SARCH: Multimodal Search for Archaeological Archives

Nivedita Sinha·Bharati Khanijo·Sanskar Singh·Priyansh Mahant·Ashutosh Roy·Saubhagya Singh Bhadouria·Arpan Jain·Maya Ramanath
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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.

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Nivedita Sinha, Bharati Khanijo, Sanskar Singh, Priyansh Mahant, Ashutosh Roy, Saubhagya Singh Bhadouria, Arpan Jain, Maya Ramanath. 2025-11-07. SARCH: Multimodal Search for Archaeological Archives. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05667

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