SBIR Phase I: Chart Explainer: Automatically Generating Natural Language Descriptions of Charts and Tables

SBIR 第一阶段：图表解释器：自动生成图表和表格的自然语言描述

• 批准号: 0339263
• 负责人: Ted Caldwell
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: CoGenTex, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-01-01 至 2004-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0339263&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Chart; Explainer; Automatically

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project addresses the problem of information accessibility by creating an innovative Chart Explainer, a generic natural language generation program which automatically composes fluent textual summaries and annotations of graphical and tabular information. The introduction of this new tool will enhance access to information for both specialized and general audiences. Self-sufficient textual summaries of charts and tables will make the information displayed in them Web-accessible to visually impaired people via existing text-to-speech tools. For sighted audiences, textual annotations will be slightly different, and serve more to complement what is easily viewed in charts and tables, summarizing and highlighting salient facts and trends. In addition, automatic production of summary text will make graphical and tabular information accessible to all audiences by phone CoGenTex envisions Chart Explainer to have a profound and beneficial impact in the information accessibility area, making graphical and tabular information Web-accessible to visually impaired people. Chapter 508 of the Federal Disability Act mandates that all the graphical and tabular information on the government Web sites be accessible to visually impaired people. Currently, Web accessibility to tables for the visually impaired is implemented by XML tagging of table cells, which are then read by the page reader devices. Web accessibility to charts is implemented using a list of data points on the chart. In both cases, the information is delivered in a very inconvenient, fragmentary way, which makes its integration and understanding difficult. In contrast, Chart Explainer will deliver graphical and tabular information in a much more natural way, conveniently summarizing it and highlighting its salient characteristics. For a general audience, the substantial impact will be in enabling phone accessibility to such information, as well as in enhancing understandability of charts and tables by providing annotations to them, which highlight salient facts and summarize the rest. Both these features will have a substantial impact on the applications in the business intelligence area, in particular, on corporate scorecarding, which commonly uses graphical displays of various kinds.

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目通过创建一个创新的图表解释器，一个通用的自然语言生成程序，自动组成流畅的文本摘要和图形和表格信息的注释，解决了信息可访问性的问题。 这一新工具的采用将加强专业和一般受众获取信息的机会。 图表和表格的文本摘要将使视障人士能够通过现有的文本转语音工具在网上获取其中显示的信息。 对于有视力的观众，文本注释将略有不同，更多地用于补充图表和表格中容易查看的内容，总结和突出的事实和趋势。 此外，摘要文本的自动生成将使所有受众都能通过电话获得图形和表格信息。CoGenTex设想Chart Explainer在信息无障碍领域产生深远而有益的影响，使视觉障碍者能够通过网络获得图形和表格信息。 《联邦残疾人法》第508章规定，政府网站上的所有图形和表格信息都必须让视力受损的人能够访问。 目前，为视障人士提供的网页无障碍表格是通过对表格单元格进行XML标记来实现的，然后由页面阅读器设备读取。 图表的Web可访问性是使用图表上的数据点列表实现的。 在这两种情况下，信息都是以一种非常不方便、支离破碎的方式传递的，这使得信息的整合和理解变得困难。 相比之下，ChartExplainer将以更自然的方式提供图形和表格信息，方便地总结它并突出其显著特征。 对一般读者来说，其实质性影响将是使人们能够通过电话获得这些信息，以及通过提供图表注释来提高图表的可理解性，这些注释突出突出了突出的事实并概述了其余部分。 这两个特性将对商业智能领域的应用程序产生重大影响，特别是对通常使用各种图形显示的公司记分卡。