The Why and The How: A Survey on Natural Language Interaction in Visualization
Henrik Voigt, Ozge Alacam, Monique Meuschke, Kai Lawonn, Sina Zarrieß
Abstract
Natural language as a modality of interaction is becoming increasingly popular in the field of visualization. In addition to the popular query interfaces, other language-based interactions such as annotations, recommendations, explanations, or documentation experience growing interest. In this survey, we provide an overview of natural language-based interaction in the research area of visualization. We discuss a renowned taxonomy of visualization tasks and classify 119 related works to illustrate the state-of-the-art of how current natural language interfaces support their performance. We examine applied NLP methods and discuss human-machine dialogue structures with a focus on initiative, duration, and communicative functions in recent visualization-oriented dialogue interfaces. Based on this overview, we point out interesting areas for the future application of NLP methods in the field of visualization.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{voigt-etal-2022-survey,
title = "The Why and The How: A Survey on Natural Language Interaction in Visualization",
author = "Voigt, Henrik and
Alacam, Ozge and
Meuschke, Monique and
Lawonn, Kai and
Zarrie{\ss}, Sina",
editor = "Carpuat, Marine and
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and
Meza Ruiz, Ivan Vladimir",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.27/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.27",
pages = "348--374"
}