Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization
Shankar Kantharaj, Rixie Tiffany Leong, Xiang Lin, Ahmed Masry, Megh Thakkar, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty
Abstract
Charts are commonly used for exploring data and communicating insights. Generating natural language summaries from charts can be very helpful for people in inferring key insights that would otherwise require a lot of cognitive and perceptual efforts. We present Chart-to-text, a large-scale benchmark with two datasets and a total of 44,096 charts covering a wide range of topics and chart types. We explain the dataset construction process and analyze the datasets. We also introduce a number of state-of-the-art neural models as baselines that utilize image captioning and data-to-text generation techniques to tackle two problem variations: one assumes the underlying data table of the chart is available while the other needs to extract data from chart images. Our analysis with automatic and human evaluation shows that while our best models usually generate fluent summaries and yield reasonable BLEU scores, they also suffer from hallucinations and factual errors as well as difficulties in correctly explaining complex patterns and trends in charts.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kantharaj-etal-2022-chart,
title = "Chart-to-Text: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chart Summarization",
author = "Kantharaj, Shankar and
Leong, Rixie Tiffany and
Lin, Xiang and
Masry, Ahmed and
Thakkar, Megh and
Hoque, Enamul and
Joty, Shafiq",
editor = "Muresan, Smaranda and
Nakov, Preslav and
Villavicencio, Aline",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = may,
year = "2022",
address = "Dublin, Ireland",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.277/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.277",
pages = "4005--4023"
}