Generating Textual Summaries of Bar Charts

Information graphics, such as bar charts and line graphs, play an important role in multimodal documents. This paper presents a novel approach to producing a brief textual summary of a simple bar chart. It outlines our approach to augmenting the core message of the graphic to produce a brief summary. Our method simultaneously constructs both the discourse and sentence structures of the textual summary using a bottom-up approach. The result is then realized in natural language. An evaluation study validates our generation methodology.