by Mary Ellen Foster

Automatically generating text to accompany information graphics Mary Ellen Foster Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 1999 Generally, when quantitative information is to be presented, some form of graphical presentation is used, often with a textual caption to ensure that the audience notices particular aspects of the data. This thesis presents the principles that should be followed by a system aiming to produce such captions automatically. The process of caption generation is examined in the context of the standard tasks in text generation. Most previous systems in this area produce textual summaries intended to stand alone; the issues involved in producing a caption differ, as the text must be coordinated with the graphic it is to accompany. The thesis also presents CAPUT, a prototype caption-generation system which follows these principles to generate single-sentence captions for information graphics of the type that might appear in a newspaper article. Finally, extensions to CAPUT that would bring it from a prototype to a full-fledged caption generation system are proposed.