Identifying the Central Figure of a Scientific Paper Publishers are increasingly using graphical abstracts to facilitate scientific search, especially across disciplinary boundaries. They are presented on various media, easily shared and information rich. However, very small amount of scientific publications are equipped with graphical abstracts. What can we do with the vast majority of papers with no selected graphical abstract? In this paper, we first hypothesize that scientific papers actually include a central figure that serve as a graphical abstract. These figures convey the key results and provide a visual identity for the paper. Using survey data collected from 6,263 authors regarding 8,353 papers over 15 years, we find that over 87% of papers are considered to contain a central figure, and that these central figures are primarily used to summarize important results, explain the key methods, or provide additional discussion. We then train a model to automatically recognize the central figure, achieving top3 accuracy of 78% and exact match accuracy of 34%. We find that the primary boost in accuracy comes from figure captions that resemble the abstract. We make all our data and results publicly available at https:github.comviziometricscentraul_figure. Our goal is to automate central figure identification to improve search engine performance and to help scientists connect ideas across the literature.

A Neural Approach for Text Extraction from Scholarly Figures In recent years, the problem of scene text extraction from images has received extensive attention and significant progress. However, text extraction from scholarly figures such as plots and charts remains an open problem, in part due to the difficulty of locating irregularly placed text lines. To the best of our knowledge, literature has not described the implementation of a text extraction system for scholarly figures that adapts deep convolutional neural networks used for scene text detection. In this paper, we propose a text extraction approach for scholarly figures that forgoes preprocessing in favor of using a deep convolutional neural network for text line localization. Our system uses a publicly available scene text detection approach whose network architecture is well suited to text extraction from scholarly figures. Training data are derived from charts in arXiv papers which are extracted using Allen Instituteu0027s pdffigures tool. Since this tool analyzes PDF data as a container format in order to extract text location through the mechanisms which render it, we were able to gather a large set of labeled training samples. We show significant improvement from methods in the literature, and discuss the structural changes of the text extraction pipeline.