Skip to main content

What is being Measured in an Information Graphic?

  • Conference paper
Book cover Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7816))

Abstract

Information graphics (such as bar charts and line graphs) are widely used in popular media. The majority of such non-pictorial graphics have the purpose of communicating a high-level message which is often not repeated in the text of the article. Thus, information graphics together with the textual segments contribute to the overall purpose of an article and cannot be ignored. Unfortunately, information graphics often do not label the dependent axis with a full descriptor of what is being measured. In order to realize the high-level message of an information graphic in natural language, a referring expression for the dependent axis must be generated. This task is complex in that the required referring expression often must be constructed by extracting and melding pieces of information from the textual content of the graphic. Our heuristic-based solution to this problem has been shown to produce reasonable text for simple bar charts. This paper presents the extensibility of that approach to other kinds of graphics, in particular to grouped bar charts and line graphs. We discuss the set of component texts contained in these two kinds of graphics, how the methodology for simple bar charts can be extended to these kinds, and the evaluation of the enhanced approach.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Belz, A., Kow, E., Viethen, J., Gatt, A.: The grec challenge 2008: Overview and evaluation results. In: The Proceedings of the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Burns, R., Carberry, S., Elzer, S., Chester, D.: Automatically Recognizing Intended Messages in Grouped Bar Charts. In: Cox, P., Plimmer, B., Rodgers, P. (eds.) Diagrams 2012. LNCS, vol. 7352, pp. 8–22. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Carberry, S., Elzer, S., Demir, S.: Information graphics: An untapped resource for digital libraries. In: The Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval Conference, pp. 581–588 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Clark, H.: Using Language. Cambridge University Press (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Demir, S., Carberry, S., Elzer, S.: Issues in realizing the overall message of a bar chart. In: Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, vol. 5, pp. 311–320. John Benjamins (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Elzer, S., Carberry, S., Chester, D., Demir, S., Green, N., Zukerman, I., Trnka, K.: Exploring and exploiting the limited utility of captions in recognizing intention in information graphics. In: The Proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 223–230 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Elzer, S., Carberry, S., Zukerman, I., Chester, D., Green, N., Demir, S.: A probabilistic framework for recognizing intention in information graphics. In: The Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1042–1047 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Fasciano, M., Lapalme, G.: Intentions in the coordinated generation of graphics and text from tabular data. Knowledge and Information Systems 2(3), 310–339 (2000)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Grosz, B., Sidner, C.: Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3), 175–204 (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Kerpedjiev, S., Green, N., Moore, J., Roth, S.: Saying it in graphics: from intentions to visualizations. In: The Proceedings of the Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 97–101 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Krahmer, E., van Erk, S., Verleg, A.: Graph-based generation of referring expressions. Computational Linguistics 29(1), 53–72 (2003)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Nenkova, A., McKeown, K.: References to named entities: a corpus study. In: The Proceedings of the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology, pp. 70–72 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Wu, P., Carberry, S., Elzer, S., Chester, D.: Recognizing the Intended Message of Line Graphs. In: Goel, A.K., Jamnik, M., Narayanan, N.H. (eds.) Diagrams 2010. LNCS, vol. 6170, pp. 220–234. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Demir, S., Elzer Schwartz, S., Burns, R., Carberry, S. (2013). What is being Measured in an Information Graphic?. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7816. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37247-6_40

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37247-6_40

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37246-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37247-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics