Breathing New Life into Existing Visualizations: A Natural Language-Driven Manipulation Framework

Abstract

We propose an approach to manipulate existing interactive visualizations to answer users' natural language queries. We analyze the natural language tasks and propose a design space of a hierarchical task structure, which allows for a systematic decomposition of complex queries. We introduce a four-level visualization manipulation space to facilitate in-situ manipulations for visualizations, enabling a fine-grained control over the visualization elements. Our methods comprise two essential components: the natural language-to-task translator and the visualization manipulation parser. The natural language-to-task translator employs advanced NLP techniques to extract structured, hierarchical tasks from natural language queries, even those with varying degrees of ambiguity. The visualization manipulation parser leverages the hierarchical task structure to streamline these tasks into a sequence of atomic visualization manipulations. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we provide real-world examples and experimental results. The evaluation highlights the precision of our natural language parsing capabilities and underscores the smooth transformation of visualization manipulations.