Providing access to the high-level content of line graphs from online popular media

Abstract

This paper presents extensions to Interactive_SIGHT (Summarizing Information Graphics Textually), a system developed to provide sight-impaired individuals with access to information graphics present in multimodal documents from popular media. SIGHT is a Web-based tool that automatically recognizes the high-level knowledge of a graphic and generates natural language text, so screen readers are able to access it. Prior to this work, the SIGHT system was able to process and generate text only for simple bar charts. However, for graphics that are represented with lines and groups of bars, only the message recognition module has been developed. This work presents the steps that have been taken in order to construct a brief natural language summary that conveys the most important high-level content of single line graphs. It describes how the features of a line graph are identified and contextualized; how the content selection strategy was chosen and implemented; and how the propositions selected to convey the knowledge in the graphic are organized, allowing the discourse to be as clear and coherent as possible.