  Visual elements in an information presentation are often spatially and
semantically grouped hierarchically for effective message delivery. Studying
the hierarchical grouping information can help researchers and designers better
explore layout structures and understand design demographics. However,
recovering hierarchical grouping is challenging due to a large number of
possibilities for compositing visual elements into a single-page design. This
paper introduces an automatic approach that takes the layout of visual elements
as input and returns the hierarchical grouping as output. To understand
information presentations, we first contribute a dataset of 23,072 information
presentations with diverse layouts to the community. Next, we propose our
technique with a Transformer-based model to predict relatedness between visual
elements and a bottom-up algorithm to produce the hierarchical grouping.
Finally, we evaluate our technique through a technical experiment and a user
study with 30 designers. The results show that the proposed technique is
promising.
