Summarization of Diagrams in Documents
Robert P. Futrelle · 1999
Documents are composed of text and graphics. There is substantial work on automated text summarization but almost none on the automated summarization of graphics. Four examples of diagrams from the scientific literature are used to indicate the problems and possible solutions: a table of images, a flow chart, a set of x,y data plots, and a block diagram. Manual summaries are first constructed. Two sources of information are used to guide summarization. The first is the internal structure of the diagram itself, its topology and geometry. The other is the text in captions, running text, and within diagrams. The diagram structure can be generated using the author's constraint-based diagram understanding system. Once the structure is obtained, procedures such as table element elision or subgraph deletion are used to produce a simpler summary form. Then automated layout algorithms can be used to generate the summary diagram. Current work on parsing and automated layout are briefly reviewed. Because automated diagram summarization is a brand-new area of inquiry, only the parsing phase of the approach has been fully implemented. Because of the complexity of the problem, there will be no single approach to summarization that will apply to all kinds of diagrams. 1.