VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning

Benny Tang, Angie Boggust, Arvind Satyanarayan


Abstract
Captions that describe or explain charts help improve recall and comprehension of the depicted data and provide a more accessible medium for people with visual disabilities. However, current approaches for automatically generating such captions struggle to articulate the perceptual or cognitive features that are the hallmark of charts (e.g., complex trends and patterns). In response, we introduce VisText: a dataset of 12,441 pairs of charts and captions that describe the charts’ construction, report key statistics, and identify perceptual and cognitive phenomena. In VisText, a chart is available as three representations: a rasterized image, a backing data table, and a scene graph—a hierarchical representation of a chart’s visual elements akin to a web page’s Document Object Model (DOM). To evaluate the impact of VisText, we fine-tune state-of-the-art language models on our chart captioning task and apply prefix-tuning to produce captions that vary the semantic content they convey. Our models generate coherent, semantically rich captions and perform on par with state-of-the-art chart captioning models across machine translation and text generation metrics. Through qualitative analysis, we identify six broad categories of errors that our models make that can inform future work.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.401
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7268–7298
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.401
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.401
Award:
 Outstanding Paper Award
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benny Tang, Angie Boggust, and Arvind Satyanarayan. 2023. VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7268–7298, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VisText: A Benchmark for Semantically Rich Chart Captioning (Tang et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.401.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.401.mp4