The State of the Art in Creating Visualization Corpora for Automated Chart Analysis

TL;DR

This paper surveys 56 studies on visualization corpora for automated chart analysis, analyzing their properties, common practices, gaps, and future needs to advance research in this field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing visualization corpora, introduces a taxonomy for analysis, and highlights research gaps and future directions.

Findings

Identifies common formats and collection methods for chart corpora.

Highlights gaps in diversity and annotation practices.

Recommends tools and properties needed for future benchmark corpora.

Abstract

We present a state-of-the-art report on visualization corpora in automated chart analysis research. We survey 56 papers that created or used a visualization corpus as the input of their research techniques or systems. Based on a multi-level task taxonomy that identifies the goal, method, and outputs of automated chart analysis, we examine the property space of existing chart corpora along five dimensions: format, scope, collection method, annotations, and diversity. Through the survey, we summarize common patterns and practices of creating chart corpora, identify research gaps and opportunities, and discuss the desired properties of future benchmark corpora and the required tools to create them.