  Recent works show that interactive documents connecting text with
visualizations facilitate reading comprehension. However, creating this type of
content requires specialized knowledge. We present ChartText, a method that
links text with visualizations in this work. Our approach supports documents
that include bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots. ChartText receives the
visual encoding of the visualization and its associated text as input. It then
performs the linking in two stages: The matching stage creates individual links
relating simple phrases between the text and the chart. Then, it combines the
individual links according to the visual channels in the grouping stage,
building more meaningful connections. We use two datasets to design and
evaluate our method; the first comes from web documents (24 bar charts and
texts) and the second from academic documents (25 bar charts, 25 line charts,
and 25 scatter plots with their texts). Our experiments show that our method
obtains F1 scores of 0.50 and 0.66 on both datasets. We can also use a
semi-automatic approach correcting individual links; in this case, the scores
rise to 0.68 and 0.84, respectively. To show the usefulness of our technique,
we implement two proofs of concept. We create interactive documents using
graphic overlays in the first one, facilitating the reading experience. We use
voice instead of text to annotate charts in real-time in the second. For
example, in a videoconference, our technique can automatically annotate a chart
following the presenter's description.
