From PDF to RAG-Ready: Evaluating Document Conversion Frameworks for Domain-Specific Question Answering
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems depend critically on the quality of document preprocessing, yet no prior study has evaluated PDF processing frameworks by their impact on downstream question-answering accuracy. We address this gap through a systematic comparison of four open-source PDF-to-Markdown conversion frameworks, Docling, MinerU, Marker, and DeepSeek OCR, across 21 pipeline configurations, varying the conversion tool, cleaning transformations, splitting strategy, and metadata enrichment. Evaluation was performed using a 50-question benchmark over a corpus of 36 Portuguese administrative documents (1706 pages, ~492K words), with LLM-as-judge scoring over 50 independent r...
| Authors | José Guilherme Marques dos Santos, Ricardo Yang, Rui Humberto Pereira et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 30 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 May 2026 |
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