Multimodal Search in Chemical Documents and Reactions (2025)
Venue: International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information
Status: Submitted
Recommended Citation: A. K. Shah, A. Dey, L. Luo, B. M. Amador, P. Philippy, M. Zhong, S. Ouyang, D. M. Friday, D. Bianchi, N. Jackson, R. Zanibbi, and J. Han, "Multimodal Search in Chemical Documents and Reactions," submitted in Proceedings of the 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, in SIGIR ’25. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, Jul. 2025
Abstract:
We present a multimodal search tool that facilitates retrieval of chemical reactions, molecular structures, and associated text from scientific literature. Queries may combine molecular diagrams, textual descriptions, and reaction data, allowing users to connect different representations of chemical information. To support this, the indexing process includes chemical diagram extraction and parsing, extraction of reaction data from text in tabular form, and cross-modal linking of diagrams and their mentions in text. We describe the system’s architecture, key functionalities, and retrieval process, along with expert assessments of the system. This demo highlights the workflow and technical components of the search system.