Intelligent Assistant for Exploring Data Visualizations

Abhinav Kumar, Jillian Aurisano, Barbara Di Eugenio, Andrew E. Johnson

Abstract: Visualization, while an effective tool for identifying patterns and insights, requires expert knowledge due to challenges faced when translating user queries to visual encodings. Research has shown that using a natural language interface (NLI) is effective for these challenges because the user can simply talk to a computer capable of producing the graphs directly. In this paper, we discuss our intelligent assistant which processes speech and hand pointing gestures while also dealing with any number of visualizations on a large screen display. Evaluation of the system shows that it is capable of quickly producing visualizations. It also particularly effective at responding to less ambiguous queries, while in certain cases can handle ambiguous or complex queries.