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

该小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目通过创建创新的Chart Explainer来解决信息可访问性问题，Chart Explainer是一个通用的自然语言生成程序，可自动编写流畅的图形和表格信息的文本摘要和注释。这一新工具的采用将加强专门受众和普通受众获取信息的机会。自给自足的图表文本摘要将使视障人士通过现有的文本语音转换工具通过网络访问其中显示的信息。对于有视力的受众，文本注释将略有不同，更多地是对图表中容易查看的内容的补充，总结和突出突出的事实和趋势。此外，自动生成摘要文本将使所有受众都可以通过电话获取图形和表格信息，CoGenTex设想Chart Explainer将对信息无障碍领域产生深远和有益的影响，使视觉障碍者可以通过网络获取图形和表格信息。《联邦残疾人法》第508章规定，视障人士可以访问政府网站上的所有图形和表格信息。目前，视障人士对表格的Web访问是通过对表格单元进行XML标记来实现的，然后由页面阅读器设备读取这些表格。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，信息的传递都非常不方便、零散，这使得信息的集成和理解变得困难。相比之下，Chart Explainer将以更自然的方式提供图形和表格信息，方便地对其进行汇总并突出其显著特征。对于普通受众来说，主要影响将是使这些信息能够通过手机获得，以及通过向图表提供注释来提高它们的易懂程度，这些注释突出突出事实并总结其余内容。这两个功能都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企业记分卡。

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.