Handling figures in document summarization

Some document genres contain a large num-ber of figures. This position paper outlines approaches to diagram summarization that can augment the many well-developed tech-niques of text summarization. We discuss figures as surrogates for entire documents, thumbnails, extraction, the relations between text and figures as well as how automation might be achieved. The focus is on diagrams (line drawings) because they allow parsing techniques to be used, in contrast to the diffi-culties of general image understanding. We describe the advances in raster image vectori-zation and parsing needed to produce corpora for diagram summarization.