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Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a crucial activity especially in the early stages of software development. GUI prototyping has widely been adopted as one of the most effective RE techniques for user-facing software systems. However, GUI prototyping requires (i) the availability of experienced requirements analysts, (ii) typically necessitates conducting multiple joint sessions with customers and (iii) creates considerable manual effort. In this work, we propose SERGUI, a novel approach enabling the Self-Elicitation of Requirements (SER) based on an automated GUI prototyping assistant. SERGUI exploits the vast prototyping knowledge embodied in a large-scale GUI repository through Natural Language Requirements (NLR) based GUI retrieval and facilitates fast feedback through GUI prototypes. The GUI retrieval approach is closely integrated with a Large Language Model (LLM) driving the prompting-based recommendation of GUI features for the current GUI prototyping context and thus stimulating the elicitation of additional requirements. We envision SERGUI to be employed in the initial RE phase, creating an initial GUI prototype specification to be used by the analyst as a means for communicating the requirements. To measure the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted a preliminary evaluation. Video presentation of SERGUI at: https://youtu.be/pzAAB9Uht80

Interactive systems are omnipresent today and the need to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is just as ubiquitous. For the elicitation and validation of requirements, GUI prototyping is a well-known and effective technique, typically employed after gathering initial user requirements represented in natural language (NL) (e.g., in the form of user stories). Unfortunately, GUI prototyping often requires extensive resources, resulting in a costly and time-consuming process. Despite various easy-to-use prototyping tools in practice, there is often a lack of adequate resources for developing GUI prototypes based on given user requirements. In this work, we present a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based approach providing assistance for validating the implementation of functional NL-based requirements in a GUI prototype embedded in a prototyping tool. In particular, our approach aims to detect functional user stories that are not implemented in a GUI prototype and provides recommendations for suitable GUI components directly implementing the requirements. We collected requirements for existing GUIs in the form of user stories and evaluated our proposed validation and recommendation approach with this dataset. The obtained results are promising for user story validation and we demonstrate feasibility for the GUI component recommendations.

Creating high-quality scientific figures can be time-consuming and challenging, even though sketching ideas on paper is relatively easy. Furthermore, recreating existing figures that are not stored in formats preserving semantic information is equally complex. To tackle this problem, we introduce DeTikZify, a novel multimodal language model that automatically synthesizes scientific figures as semantics-preserving TikZ graphics programs based on sketches and existing figures. To achieve this, we create three new datasets: DaTikZv2, the largest TikZ dataset to date, containing over 360k human-created TikZ graphics; SketchFig, a dataset that pairs hand-drawn sketches with their corresponding scientific figures; and SciCap++, a collection of diverse scientific figures and associated metadata. We train DeTikZify on SciCap++ and DaTikZv2, along with synthetically generated sketches learned from SketchFig. We also introduce an MCTS-based inference algorithm that enables DeTikZify to iteratively refine its outputs without the need for additional training. Through both automatic and human evaluation, we demonstrate that DeTikZify outperforms commercial Claude 3 and GPT-4V in synthesizing TikZ programs, with the MCTS algorithm effectively boosting its performance. We make our code, models, and datasets publicly available., Comment: Project page: https://github.com/potamides/DeTikZify

Extensive efforts in the past have been directed toward the development of summarization datasets. However, a predominant number of these resources have been (semi)-automatically generated, typically through web data crawling, resulting in subpar resources for training and evaluating summarization systems, a quality compromise that is arguably due to the substantial costs associated with generating ground-truth summaries, particularly for diverse languages and specialized domains. To address this issue, we present ACLSum, a novel summarization dataset carefully crafted and evaluated by domain experts. In contrast to previous datasets, ACLSum facilitates multi-aspect summarization of scientific papers, covering challenges, approaches, and outcomes in depth. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the quality of our resource and the performance of models based on pretrained language models and state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). Additionally, we explore the effectiveness of extractive versus abstractive summarization within the scholarly domain on the basis of automatically discovered aspects. Our results corroborate previous findings in the general domain and indicate the general superiority of end-to-end aspect-based summarization. Our data is released at https://github.com/sobamchan/aclsum.

Keywords, that is, content-relevant words in summaries play an important role in efficient information conveyance, making it critical to assess if system-generated summaries contain such informative words during evaluation. However, existing evaluation metrics for extreme summarization models do not pay explicit attention to keywords in summaries, leaving developers ignorant of their presence. To address this issue, we present a keyword-oriented evaluation metric, dubbed ROUGE-K, which provides a quantitative answer to the question of -- \textit{How well do summaries include keywords?} Through the lens of this keyword-aware metric, we surprisingly find that a current strong baseline model often misses essential information in their summaries. Our analysis reveals that human annotators indeed find the summaries with more keywords to be more relevant to the source documents. This is an important yet previously overlooked aspect in evaluating summarization systems. Finally, to enhance keyword inclusion, we propose four approaches for incorporating word importance into a transformer-based model and experimentally show that it enables guiding models to include more keywords while keeping the overall quality. Our code is released at https://github.com/sobamchan/rougek.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently revolutionized automated text understanding and generation. The performance of these models relies on the high number of parameters of the underlying neural architectures, which allows LLMs to memorize part of the vast quantity of data seen during the training. This paper investigates whether and to what extent general-purpose pre-trained LLMs have memorized information from known ontologies. Our results show that LLMs partially know ontologies: they can, and do indeed, memorize concepts from ontologies mentioned in the text, but the level of memorization of their concepts seems to vary proportionally to their popularity on the Web, the primary source of their training material. We additionally propose new metrics to estimate the degree of memorization of ontological information in LLMs by measuring the consistency of the output produced across different prompt repetitions, query languages, and degrees of determinism.

Cross-lingual transfer learning from high-resource to medium and low-resource languages has shown encouraging results. However, the scarcity of resources in target languages remains a challenge. In this work, we resort to data augmentation and continual pre-training for domain adaptation to improve cross-lingual abusive language detection. For data augmentation, we analyze two existing techniques based on vicinal risk minimization and propose MIXAG, a novel data augmentation method which interpolates pairs of instances based on the angle of their representations. Our experiments involve seven languages typologically distinct from English and three different domains. The results reveal that the data augmentation strategies can enhance few-shot cross-lingual abusive language detection. Specifically, we observe that consistently in all target languages, MIXAG improves significantly in multidomain and multilingual environments. Finally, we show through an error analysis how the domain adaptation can favour the class of abusive texts (reducing false negatives), but at the same time, declines the precision of the abusive language detection model., Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2023 (Main Conference)

We present a cross-domain approach for automated measurement and context extraction based on pre-trained language models. We construct a multi-source, multi-domain corpus and train an end-to-end extraction pipeline. We then apply multi-source task-adaptive pre-training and fine-tuning to benchmark the cross-domain generalization capability of our model. Further, we conceptualize and apply a task-specific error analysis and derive insights for future work. Our results suggest that multi-source training leads to the best overall results, while single-source training yields the best results for the respective individual domain. While our setup is successful at extracting quantity values and units, more research is needed to improve the extraction of contextual entities. We make the cross-domain corpus used in this work available online., Comment: Published as a workshop paper at BioNLP 2023

Demographic factors (e.g., gender or age) shape our language. Previous work showed that incorporating demographic factors can consistently improve performance for various NLP tasks with traditional NLP models. In this work, we investigate whether these previous findings still hold with state-of-the-art pretrained Transformer-based language models (PLMs). We use three common specialization methods proven effective for incorporating external knowledge into pretrained Transformers (e.g., domain-specific or geographic knowledge). We adapt the language representations for the demographic dimensions of gender and age, using continuous language modeling and dynamic multi-task learning for adaptation, where we couple language modeling objectives with the prediction of demographic classes. Our results, when employing a multilingual PLM, show substantial gains in task performance across four languages (English, German, French, and Danish), which is consistent with the results of previous work. However, controlling for confounding factors - primarily domain and language proficiency of Transformer-based PLMs - shows that downstream performance gains from our demographic adaptation do not actually stem from demographic knowledge. Our results indicate that demographic specialization of PLMs, while holding promise for positive societal impact, still represents an unsolved problem for (modern) NLP., Comment: Findings of EACL 2023. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.01029

In this paper, we provide an overview of the SV-Ident shared task as part of the 3rd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at COLING 2022. In the shared task, participants were provided with a sentence and a vocabulary of variables, and asked to identify which variables, if any, are mentioned in individual sentences from scholarly documents in full text. Two teams made a total of 9 submissions to the shared task leaderboard. While none of the teams improve on the baseline systems, we still draw insights from their submissions. Furthermore, we provide a detailed evaluation. Data and baselines for our shared task are freely available at https://github.com/vadis-project/sv-ident

Nowadays there is a growing trend in many scientific disciplines to support researchers by providing enhanced information access through linking of publications and underlying datasets, so as to support research with infrastructure to enhance reproducibility and reusability of research results. In this research note, we present an overview of an ongoing research project, named VADIS (VAriable Detection, Interlinking and Summarization), that aims at developing technology and infrastructure for enhanced information access in the Social Sciences via search and summarization of publications on the basis of automatic identification and indexing of survey variables in text. We provide an overview of the overarching vision underlying our project, its main components, and related challenges, as well as a thorough discussion of how these are meant to address the limitations of current information access systems for publications in the Social Sciences. We show how this goal can be concretely implemented in an end-user system by presenting a search prototype, which is based on user requirements collected from qualitative interviews with empirical Social Science researchers., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures

Sociodemographic factors (e.g., gender or age) shape our language. Previous work showed that incorporating specific sociodemographic factors can consistently improve performance for various NLP tasks in traditional NLP models. We investigate whether these previous findings still hold with state-of-the-art pretrained Transformers. We use three common specialization methods proven effective for incorporating external knowledge into pretrained Transformers (e.g., domain-specific or geographic knowledge). We adapt the language representations for the sociodemographic dimensions of gender and age, using continuous language modeling and dynamic multi-task learning for adaptation, where we couple language modeling with the prediction of a sociodemographic class. Our results when employing a multilingual model show substantial performance gains across four languages (English, German, French, and Danish). These findings are in line with the results of previous work and hold promise for successful sociodemographic specialization. However, controlling for confounding factors like domain and language shows that, while sociodemographic adaptation does improve downstream performance, the gains do not always solely stem from sociodemographic knowledge. Our results indicate that sociodemographic specialization, while very important, is still an unresolved problem in NLP.

While pretrained language models (PLMs) primarily serve as general-purpose text encoders that can be fine-tuned for a wide variety of downstream tasks, recent work has shown that they can also be rewired to produce high-quality word representations (i.e., static word embeddings) and yield good performance in type-level lexical tasks. While existing work primarily focused on the lexical specialization of monolingual PLMs with immense quantities of monolingual constraints, in this work we expose massively multilingual transformers (MMTs, e.g., mBERT or XLM-R) to multilingual lexical knowledge at scale, leveraging BabelNet as the readily available rich source of multilingual and cross-lingual type-level lexical knowledge. Concretely, we use BabelNet's multilingual synsets to create synonym pairs (or synonym-gloss pairs) across 50 languages and then subject the MMTs (mBERT and XLM-R) to a lexical specialization procedure guided by a contrastive objective. We show that such massively multilingual lexical specialization brings substantial gains in two standard cross-lingual lexical tasks, bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity, as well as in cross-lingual sentence retrieval. Crucially, we observe gains for languages unseen in specialization, indicating that multilingual lexical specialization enables generalization to languages with no lexical constraints. In a series of subsequent controlled experiments, we show that the number of specialization constraints plays a much greater role than the set of languages from which they originate., Comment: Accepted in ACL 2023

The number of scientific publications nowadays is rapidly increasing, causing information overload for researchers and making it hard for scholars to keep up to date with current trends and lines of work. Consequently, recent work on applying text mining technologies for scholarly publications has investigated the application of automatic text summarization technologies, including extreme summarization, for this domain. However, previous work has concentrated only on monolingual settings, primarily in English. In this paper, we fill this research gap and present an abstractive cross-lingual summarization dataset for four different languages in the scholarly domain, which enables us to train and evaluate models that process English papers and generate summaries in German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. We present our new X-SCITLDR dataset for multilingual summarization and thoroughly benchmark different models based on a state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained model, including a two-stage `summarize and translate' approach and a direct cross-lingual model. We additionally explore the benefits of intermediate-stage training using English monolingual summarization and machine translation as intermediate tasks and analyze performance in zero- and few-shot scenarios., Comment: JCDL2022

This paper introduces our proposed system for the MIA Shared Task on Cross-lingual Open-retrieval Question Answering (COQA). In this challenging scenario, given an input question the system has to gather evidence documents from a multilingual pool and generate from them an answer in the language of the question. We devised several approaches combining different model variants for three main components: Data Augmentation, Passage Retrieval, and Answer Generation. For passage retrieval, we evaluated the monolingual BM25 ranker against the ensemble of re-rankers based on multilingual pretrained language models (PLMs) and also variants of the shared task baseline, re-training it from scratch using a recently introduced contrastive loss that maintains a strong gradient signal throughout training by means of mixed negative samples. For answer generation, we focused on language- and domain-specialization by means of continued language model (LM) pretraining of existing multilingual encoders. Additionally, for both passage retrieval and answer generation, we augmented the training data provided by the task organizers with automatically generated question-answer pairs created from Wikipedia passages to mitigate the issue of data scarcity, particularly for the low-resource languages for which no training data were provided. Our results show that language- and domain-specialization as well as data augmentation help, especially for low-resource languages.

Research on (multi-domain) task-oriented dialog (TOD) has predominantly focused on the English language, primarily due to the shortage of robust TOD datasets in other languages, preventing the systematic investigation of cross-lingual transfer for this crucial NLP application area. In this work, we introduce Multi2WOZ, a new multilingual multi-domain TOD dataset, derived from the well-established English dataset MultiWOZ, that spans four typologically diverse languages: Chinese, German, Arabic, and Russian. In contrast to concurrent efforts, Multi2WOZ contains gold-standard dialogs in target languages that are directly comparable with development and test portions of the English dataset, enabling reliable and comparative estimates of cross-lingual transfer performance for TOD. We then introduce a new framework for multilingual conversational specialization of pretrained language models (PrLMs) that aims to facilitate cross-lingual transfer for arbitrary downstream TOD tasks. Using such conversational PrLMs specialized for concrete target languages, we systematically benchmark a number of zero-shot and few-shot cross-lingual transfer approaches on two standard TOD tasks: Dialog State Tracking and Response Retrieval. Our experiments show that, in most setups, the best performance entails the combination of (I) conversational specialization in the target language and (ii) few-shot transfer for the concrete TOD task. Most importantly, we show that our conversational specialization in the target language allows for an exceptionally sample-efficient few-shot transfer for downstream TOD tasks., Comment: NAACL 2022

Although much work in NLP has focused on measuring and mitigating stereotypical bias in semantic spaces, research addressing bias in computational argumentation is still in its infancy. In this paper, we address this research gap and conduct a thorough investigation of bias in argumentative language models. To this end, we introduce ABBA, a novel resource for bias measurement specifically tailored to argumentation. We employ our resource to assess the effect of argumentative fine-tuning and debiasing on the intrinsic bias found in transformer-based language models using a lightweight adapter-based approach that is more sustainable and parameter-efficient than full fine-tuning. Finally, we analyze the potential impact of language model debiasing on the performance in argument quality prediction, a downstream task of computational argumentation. Our results show that we are able to successfully and sustainably remove bias in general and argumentative language models while preserving (and sometimes improving) model performance in downstream tasks. We make all experimental code and data available at https://github.com/umanlp/FairArgumentativeLM., Comment: ACL 2022

Process extraction from text is an important task of process discovery, for which various approaches have been developed in recent years. However, in contrast to other information extraction tasks, there is a lack of gold-standard corpora of business process descriptions that are carefully annotated with all the entities and relationships of interest. Due to this, it is currently hard to compare the results obtained by extraction approaches in an objective manner, whereas the lack of annotated texts also prevents the application of data-driven information extraction methodologies, typical of the natural language processing field. Therefore, to bridge this gap, we present the PET dataset, a first corpus of business process descriptions annotated with activities, gateways, actors, and flow information. We present our new resource, including a variety of baselines to benchmark the difficulty and challenges of business process extraction from text. PET can be accessed via huggingface.co/datasets/patriziobellan/PET

In this work we present a systematic empirical study focused on the suitability of the state-of-the-art multilingual encoders for cross-lingual document and sentence retrieval tasks across a number of diverse language pairs. We first treat these models as multilingual text encoders and benchmark their performance in unsupervised ad-hoc sentence- and document-level CLIR. In contrast to supervised language understanding, our results indicate that for unsupervised document-level CLIR -- a setup with no relevance judgments for IR-specific fine-tuning -- pretrained multilingual encoders on average fail to significantly outperform earlier models based on CLWEs. For sentence-level retrieval, we do obtain state-of-the-art performance: the peak scores, however, are met by multilingual encoders that have been further specialized, in a supervised fashion, for sentence understanding tasks, rather than using their vanilla 'off-the-shelf' variants. Following these results, we introduce localized relevance matching for document-level CLIR, where we independently score a query against document sections. In the second part, we evaluate multilingual encoders fine-tuned in a supervised fashion (i.e., we learn to rank) on English relevance data in a series of zero-shot language and domain transfer CLIR experiments. Our results show that supervised re-ranking rarely improves the performance of multilingual transformers as unsupervised base rankers. Finally, only with in-domain contrastive fine-tuning (i.e., same domain, only language transfer), we manage to improve the ranking quality. We uncover substantial empirical differences between cross-lingual retrieval results and results of (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer for monolingual retrieval in target languages, which point to "monolingual overfitting" of retrieval models trained on monolingual data., Comment: to appear in IRJ ECIR 2021 Special Issue. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2101.08370

Recent work has shown that self-supervised dialog-specific pretraining on large conversational datasets yields substantial gains over traditional language modeling (LM) pretraining in downstream task-oriented dialog (TOD). These approaches, however, exploit general dialogic corpora (e.g., Reddit) and thus presumably fail to reliably embed domain-specific knowledge useful for concrete downstream TOD domains. In this work, we investigate the effects of domain specialization of pretrained language models (PLMs) for TOD. Within our DS-TOD framework, we first automatically extract salient domain-specific terms, and then use them to construct DomainCC and DomainReddit -- resources that we leverage for domain-specific pretraining, based on (i) masked language modeling (MLM) and (ii) response selection (RS) objectives, respectively. We further propose a resource-efficient and modular domain specialization by means of domain adapters -- additional parameter-light layers in which we encode the domain knowledge. Our experiments with prominent TOD tasks -- dialog state tracking (DST) and response retrieval (RR) -- encompassing five domains from the MultiWOZ benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of DS-TOD. Moreover, we show that the light-weight adapter-based specialization (1) performs comparably to full fine-tuning in single domain setups and (2) is particularly suitable for multi-domain specialization, where besides advantageous computational footprint, it can offer better TOD performance., Comment: Findings of ACL 2022

The extraction of process models from text refers to the problem of turning the information contained in an unstructured textual process descriptions into a formal representation,i.e.,a process model. Several automated approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, but they are highly heterogeneous in scope and underlying assumptions,i.e., differences in input, target output, and data used in their evaluation.As a result, it is currently unclear how well existing solutions are able to solve the model-extraction problem and how they compare to each other.We overcome this issue by comparing 10 state-of-the-art approaches for model extraction in a systematic manner, covering both qualitative and quantitative aspects.The qualitative evaluation compares the analysis of the primary studies on: 1 the main characteristics of each solution;2 the type of process model elements extracted from the input data;3 the experimental evaluation performed to evaluate the proposed framework.The results show a heterogeneity of techniques, elements extracted and evaluations conducted, that are often impossible to compare.To overcome this difficulty we propose a quantitative comparison of the tools proposed by the papers on the unifying task of process model entity and relation extraction so as to be able to compare them directly.The results show three distinct groups of tools in terms of performance, with no tool obtaining very good scores and also serious limitations.Moreover, the proposed evaluation pipeline can be considered a reference task on a well-defined dataset and metrics that can be used to compare new tools. The paper also presents a reflection on the results of the qualitative and quantitative evaluation on the limitations and challenges that the community needs to address in the future to produce significant advances in this area.

We analyze bias in historical corpora as encoded in diachronic distributional semantic models by focusing on two specific forms of bias, namely a political (i.e., anti-communism) and racist (i.e., antisemitism) one. For this, we use a new corpus of German parliamentary proceedings, DeuPARL, spanning the period 1867--2020. We complement this analysis of historical biases in diachronic word embeddings with a novel measure of bias on the basis of term co-occurrences and graph-based label propagation. The results of our bias measurements align with commonly perceived historical trends of antisemitic and anti-communist biases in German politics in different time periods, thus indicating the viability of analyzing historical bias trends using semantic spaces induced from historical corpora., Comment: Accepted for JCDL2021

Taxonomies are an important ingredient of knowledge organization, and serve as a backbone for more sophisticated knowledge representations in intelligent systems, such as formal ontologies. However, building taxonomies manually is a costly endeavor, and hence, automatic methods for taxonomy induction are a good alternative to build large-scale taxonomies. In this paper, we propose TIEmb, an approach for automatic unsupervised class subsumption axiom extraction from knowledge bases using entity and text embeddings. We apply the approach on the WebIsA database, a database of subsumption relations extracted from the large portion of the World Wide Web, to extract class hierarchies in the Person and Place domain., Comment: Published at IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence 2017 (WI'17)

Recent research efforts in NLP have demonstrated that distributional word vector spaces often encode stereotypical human biases, such as racism and sexism. With word representations ubiquitously used in NLP models and pipelines, this raises ethical issues and jeopardizes the fairness of language technologies. While there exists a large body of work on bias measures and debiasing methods, to date, there is no platform that would unify these research efforts and make bias measuring and debiasing of representation spaces widely accessible. In this work, we present DebIE, the first integrated platform for (1) measuring and (2) mitigating bias in word embeddings. Given an (i) embedding space (users can choose between the predefined spaces or upload their own) and (ii) a bias specification (users can choose between existing bias specifications or create their own), DebIE can (1) compute several measures of implicit and explicit bias and modify the embedding space by executing two (mutually composable) debiasing models. DebIE's functionality can be accessed through four different interfaces: (a) a web application, (b) a desktop application, (c) a REST-ful API, and (d) as a command-line application. DebIE is available at: debie.informatik.uni-mannheim.de., Comment: Accepted as EACL21 Demo

Fake news articles often stir the readers' attention by means of emotional appeals that arouse their feelings. Unlike in short news texts, authors of longer articles can exploit such affective factors to manipulate readers by adding exaggerations or fabricating events, in order to affect the readers' emotions. To capture this, we propose in this paper to model the flow of affective information in fake news articles using a neural architecture. The proposed model, FakeFlow, learns this flow by combining topic and affective information extracted from text. We evaluate the model's performance with several experiments on four real-world datasets. The results show that FakeFlow achieves superior results when compared against state-of-the-art methods, thus confirming the importance of capturing the flow of the affective information in news articles., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, EACL-2021

Pretrained multilingual text encoders based on neural Transformer architectures, such as multilingual BERT (mBERT) and XLM, have achieved strong performance on a myriad of language understanding tasks. Consequently, they have been adopted as a go-to paradigm for multilingual and cross-lingual representation learning and transfer, rendering cross-lingual word embeddings (CLWEs) effectively obsolete. However, questions remain to which extent this finding generalizes 1) to unsupervised settings and 2) for ad-hoc cross-lingual IR (CLIR) tasks. Therefore, in this work we present a systematic empirical study focused on the suitability of the state-of-the-art multilingual encoders for cross-lingual document and sentence retrieval tasks across a large number of language pairs. In contrast to supervised language understanding, our results indicate that for unsupervised document-level CLIR -- a setup with no relevance judgments for IR-specific fine-tuning -- pretrained encoders fail to significantly outperform models based on CLWEs. For sentence-level CLIR, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art performance can be achieved. However, the peak performance is not met using the general-purpose multilingual text encoders `off-the-shelf', but rather relying on their variants that have been further specialized for sentence understanding tasks., Comment: accepted at ECIR'21 (preprint)

Providing visual summaries of scientific publications can increase information access for readers and thereby help deal with the exponential growth in the number of scientific publications. Nonetheless, efforts in providing visual publication summaries have been few and far apart, primarily focusing on the biomedical domain. This is primarily because of the limited availability of annotated gold standards, which hampers the application of robust and high-performing supervised learning techniques. To address these problems we create a new benchmark dataset for selecting figures to serve as visual summaries of publications based on their abstracts, covering several domains in computer science. Moreover, we develop a self-supervised learning approach, based on heuristic matching of inline references to figures with figure captions. Experiments in both biomedical and computer science domains show that our model is able to outperform the state of the art despite being self-supervised and therefore not relying on any annotated training data.