Towards Natural Language Interfaces for Data Visualization: A Survey
This is an incremental survey that organizes research for the V-NLI community, aiding developers and researchers in understanding and advancing natural language interfaces for data visualization.
The paper surveys Visualization-oriented Natural Language Interfaces (V-NLI) as a complementary input for visual analytics, reviewing existing systems and proposing a classification framework based on a seven-stage pipeline.
Utilizing Visualization-oriented Natural Language Interfaces (V-NLI) as a complementary input modality to direct manipulation for visual analytics can provide an engaging user experience. It enables users to focus on their tasks rather than having to worry about how to operate visualization tools on the interface. In the past two decades, leveraging advanced natural language processing technologies, numerous V-NLI systems have been developed in academic research and commercial software, especially in recent years. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive review of the existing V-NLIs. In order to classify each paper, we develop categorical dimensions based on a classic information visualization pipeline with the extension of a V-NLI layer. The following seven stages are used: query interpretation, data transformation, visual mapping, view transformation, human interaction, dialogue management, and presentation. Finally, we also shed light on several promising directions for future work in the V-NLI community.