Automatic chart to text summarization is an effective tool for the visually impaired people along with providing precise insights of tabular data in natural language to the user. A large and well-structured dataset is always a key part for data driven models. In this paper, we propose ChartSumm: a large-scale benchmark dataset consisting of a total of 84,363 charts along with their metadata and descriptions covering a wide range of topics and chart types to generate short and long summaries. Extensive experiments with strong baseline models show that even though these models generate fluent and informative summaries by achieving decent scores in various automatic evaluation metrics, they often face issues like suffering from hallucination, missing out important data points, in addition to incorrect explanation of complex trends in the charts. We also investigated the potential of expanding ChartSumm to other languages using automated translation tools. These make our dataset a challenging benchmark for future research.

翻译：图表到文本的自动总结是为视障人士提供自然语言形式表格数据精确洞察的有效工具。大规模且结构良好的数据集始终是数据驱动模型的关键要素。本文提出ChartSumm：一个大规模基准数据集，包含84,363张图表及其元数据和描述，覆盖广泛的主题与图表类型，用于生成短摘要与长摘要。基于强基线模型的广泛实验表明，尽管这些模型在多种自动评估指标上取得较好分数，能够生成流畅且信息丰富的摘要，但常面临幻觉问题、遗漏重要数据点以及错误解释图表复杂趋势等挑战。我们还探索了利用自动翻译工具将ChartSumm扩展至其他语言的潜力。这些特性使我们的数据集成为未来研究领域一个具有挑战性的基准。