Representing data in words
This addresses the need for accessible data communication in fields like sports and psychology, but it is incremental as it adapts existing visualization concepts to text generation.
The paper tackles the problem of conveying data insights through text instead of visualizations by introducing 'wordalisations', which use large language models to generate easy-to-digest descriptions without numerical values, and demonstrates this on football scouting, personality tests, and survey data.
An important part of data science is the use of visualisations to display data in a way that is easy to digest. Visualisations often rely on underlying statistical or machine learning models -- ranging from basic calculations like category means to advanced methods such as principal component analysis of multidimensional datasets -- to convey insights. We introduce an analogous concept for word descriptions of data, which we call wordalisations. Wordalisations describe data in easy to digest words, without necessarily reporting numerical values from the data. We show how to create wordalisations using large language models, through prompt templates engineered according to a task-agnostic structure which can be used to automatically generate prompts from data. We show how to produce reliable and engaging texts on three application areas: scouting football players, personality tests, and international survey data. Using the model cards framework, we emphasise the importance of clearly stating the model we are imposing on the data when creating the wordalisation, detailing how numerical values are translated into words, incorporating background information into prompts for the large language model, and documenting the limitations of the wordalisations. We argue that our model cards approach is a more appropriate framework for setting best practices in wordalisation of data than performance tests on benchmark datasets.