Creating Digital Collages Inspired by English Texts

Often, textual data is accompanied by images in an attempt to help the user better understand the content. Drawing inspiration from this, it would be interesting to transform any given text into a digital image collage, an artistic graphic object. To automate the process, we developed a software system that uses Natural Language Processing to summarize large paragraphs of text, retrieves images from databases, and arranges them with a Genetic Algorithm on a digital canvas. Given that certain images may be more important to the user, the software computes emphasis factors for scaling the images in the collage. We performed computational experiments to validate each module of our system and initiated user studies to examine their perception of the collages.