A natural language interface to visual data exploration would allow a user to directly specify questions through speech, allowing the user to focus on higher-order tasks, such as hypothesis generation and question formulation.

However, visual data exploration involves repeated cycles of visualization construction and interaction, as well as reasoning across many visualizations generated over the course of an exploratory session. A ’conversational interface’, which maintains a dialog with the user through natural language and gestures, could support these complex tasks.

We conducted an observational, exploratory study to observe the interaction between a subject and a remote data analysis expert (DAE) who assists the subject in an exploratory data analysis task.

PDF

Aurisano, J., Kumar, A., Gonzalez, A., Reda, K., Leigh, J., DiEugenio, B., Johnson, A., “Show me data” Observational study of a conversational interface in visual data exploration, IEEE Visualization 2015, Chicago, IL, October 25th, 2015.