KnowVis: Knowledge-Centric Visual Summarization for Video Lectures

Yi Xu, Yifan Hou, Xiaoyu Zhang


Abstract
Video lectures are valuable educational resources, but their dense and lengthy formats often overwhelm novice learners. This difficulty stems from a fundamental pedagogical mismatch: while videos deliver transient information linearly, human learning requires constructing interconnected cognitive networks, a task that induces severe cognitive overload for novice learners lacking prior domain knowledge. Existing video summarization methods fail to resolve this mismatch, as they primarily produce text-heavy, linear condensations that still demand high cognitive effort. To bridge this gap, we propose KnowVis, a framework that transforms linear video lectures into pedagogically grounded visual narratives. KnowVis first extracts a detailed concept map from multimodal video content to identify important and challenging threshold concepts, then constructs structured knowledge units, and finally synthesizes engaging visual summaries. Alongside the framework, we introduce a curated dataset of 125 educational videos across 10 academic disciplines, paired with 1,079 generated visual summaries. Extensive automated evaluations and a human study demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art baselines, KnowVis generates more accurate and clear visuals that successfully reduce cognitive load and significantly improve student learning effectiveness and knowledge retention.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2413
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51823–51840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2413/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Xu, Yifan Hou, and Xiaoyu Zhang. 2026. KnowVis: Knowledge-Centric Visual Summarization for Video Lectures. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 51823–51840, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
KnowVis: Knowledge-Centric Visual Summarization for Video Lectures (Xu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2413.pdf