Describing UI Screenshots in Natural Language

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openAccess

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Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2022-11-09

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Mcode

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Language

en

Pages

28

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ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Volume 14, issue 1

Abstract

Being able to describe any user interface (UI) screenshot in natural language can promote understanding of the main purpose of the UI, yet currently it cannot be accomplished with state-of-the-art captioning systems. We introduce XUI, a novel method inspired by the global precedence effect to create informative descriptions of UIs, starting with an overview and then providing fine-grained descriptions about the most salient elements. XUI builds upon computational models for topic classification, visual saliency prediction, and natural language generation (NLG). XUI provides descriptions with up to three different granularity levels that, together, describe what is in the interface and what the user can do with it. We found that XUI descriptions are highly readable, are perceived to accurately describe the UI, and score similarly to human-generated UI descriptions. XUI is available as open-source software.

Description

Funding Information: We acknowledge the computational resources provided by the Aalto Science-IT project. We thank Homayun Afrabandpey, Daniel Buschek, Jussi Jokinen, and Jörg Tiedemann for reviewing an earlier draft of this article. This work has been supported by the Horizon 2020 FET program of the European Union through the ERA-NET Cofund funding (grant CHIST-ERA-20-BCI-001), the European Innovation Council Pathfinder program (SYMBIOTIK project), and the Academy of Finland (grants 291556, 318559, 310947). Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Keywords

Captioning, deep learning, natural language processing, visual saliency

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Citation

Leiva, L A, Hota, A & Oulasvirta, A 2022, ' Describing UI Screenshots in Natural Language ', ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, vol. 14, no. 1, 19 . https://doi.org/10.1145/3564702