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Charts often contain visually prominent features that draw attention to aspects of the data and include text captions that emphasize aspects of the data. Through a crowdsourced study, we explore how readers gather takeaways when considering charts and captions together. We first ask participants to mark visually prominent regions in a set of line charts. We then generate text captions based on the prominent features and ask participants to report their takeaways after observing chart-caption pairs. We find that when both the chart and caption describe a high-prominence feature, readers treat the doubly emphasized high-prominence feature as the takeaway; when the caption describes a low-prominence chart feature, readers rely on the chart and report a higher-prominence feature as the takeaway. We also find that external information that provides context, helps further convey the caption’s message to the reader. We use these findings to provide guidelines for authoring effective chart-caption pairs. 

Document authors commonly use tables to support arguments presented in the text. But, because tables are usually separate from the main body text, readers must split their attention between different parts of the document. We present an interactive document reader that automatically links document text with corresponding table cells. Readers can select a sentence (or tables cells) and our reader highlights the relevant table cells (or sentences). We provide an automatic pipeline for extracting such references between sentence text and table cells for existing PDF documents that combines structural analysis of tables with natural language processing and rule-based matching. On a test corpus of 330 (sentence, table) pairs, our pipeline correctly extracts 48.8% of the references. An additional 30.5% contain only false negatives (FN) errors -- the reference is missing table cells. The remaining 20.7% contain false positives (FP) errors -- the reference includes extraneous table cells and could therefore mislead readers. A user study finds that despite such errors, our interactive document reader helps readers match sentences with corresponding table cells more accurately and quickly than a baseline document reader.