Compendia: Automated Visual Storytelling Generation from Online Article Collection

TL;DR

Compendia is an automated system that retrieves online articles, extracts and organizes quantitative facts, and generates interactive visual stories tailored to user queries, enhancing digital journalism and information synthesis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel end-to-end framework for transforming unstructured online articles into coherent, visual narratives through automated fact extraction and storytelling modules.

Findings

High accuracy in fact extraction and organization.

Positive user feedback on usability and engagement.

Effective generation of visual stories for open-ended queries.

Abstract

In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and human-centred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user's query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user's informational needs. Compendia addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; Data Fact Extraction, which identifies, validates, and refines quantitative facts; Fact Organization, which clusters and merges related facts into coherent thematic groups; and Visual Storytelling, which transforms the organized facts into narratives with visualizations in an interactive scrollytelling interface. We evaluated Compendia through a quantitative analysis, confirming the accuracy in fact extraction and organization, and through two user studies with 16 participants, demonstrating its usability, effectiveness, and ability to produce engaging visual stories for open-ended queries.