Arrows are the verbs of diagrams

Malihe Alikhani, Matthew Stone

Abstract:

Arrows are a key ingredient of schematic pictorial communication. This paper investigates the
interpretation of arrows through linguistic, crowdsourcing and machine-learning methodology.
Our work establishes a novel analogy between arrows and verbs: we advocate representing arrows in terms of qualitatively different structural and semantic frames, and resolving frames to
specific interpretations using shallow world knowledge.