Chart Explainer is a software environment for automatically generating natural-language summaries of charts and tables, developed by CoGenTex under a Phase I SBIR award sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). 



Chart Explainer is designed to enhance the accessibility of data-intensive presentations, by making it easier to understand the most salient facts about the data. Chart Explainer can help organizations to meet Section 508 requirements by making charts and tables more accessible to visually impaired users, but textual summaries can also be useful to anyone who wants an easier way to understand complex datasets. 



Chart Explainer uses CoGenTex’s proprietary natural language generation technology to create fluent, readable summaries, regardless of the subject domain of the data. Chart Explainer’s graphical configuration interface makes it easy to import data from a variety of sources, and configure summaries interactively. Simple point-and-click operations let you specify the correct terminology for describing your data, and select from a variety of summarization options for multi-dimensional datasets. 



Once summarization options have been configured for a dataset, Chart Explainer can generate summaries on demand, to reflect changing data. Chart Explainer will be integrated with the most popular third-party tools, such as data analysis software, charting packages, and application servers, for ease of deployment.