Answering it with Charts: Dialogue in Natural Language and Charts

Answering it with charts — Dialogue in natural language and charts — Tsuneaki KATO Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguroku, Tokyo 153-8902 Japan kato@boz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp Mitsunori MATSUSHITA and Eisaku MAEDA NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corp. 2-4 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto 619-0237 Japan � mat, maeda � @cslab.kecl.ntt.co.jp Abstract A methodology is proposed for taking queries and requests expressed in natural language as input and answering them in charts through organizing that in- teraction into felicitous dialogue. Charts and graph- ics, as well as languages, are important modes of communication. This is especially true of those which are used frequently when people analyze huge amount of data interactively, in order to find out its characteristics or to resolve questions about it. This paper raises the problem that in such situ- ations the correctness of the charts depends on the context, and proposes a framework to resolve it. The core of the framework is a logical form that includes the specifications of the user’s perspective and the proper treatment of the logical form for handling utterance fragments. The framework has been im- plemented and confirmed to be appropriate. 1 Introduction Charts and graphics, as well as languages, are im- portant modes of communication. Considering this importance, the automatic design of charts and graphics suitable for achieving a given communica- tive purpose has been studied actively (Maybury and Wahlster, 1998). It has been demonstrated that the characteristics of data drawn on the chart (Mackin- lay, 1986), the intention to be achieved through the chart (Roth and Mattis, 1990), and the task accom- plished using the chart (Casner, 1991) play impor- tant roles in designing appropriate charts. The au- tomatic design of multimedia documents in which those charts coordinate with natural language text has also been studied (Roth et al., 1991; Kerpedjiev et al., 1998). In that research, systems take an assertion to be conveyed or a communicative goal to be achieved, and design the most appropriate multimedia pre- sentation for that purpose. The purpose of draw- ing charts and graphics, however, is not restricted just to use in such presentations. In particular, as the drawing of quantitative charts helps to analyze huge amount of data and to find out its characteris- tics, they can be a useful means for interactive ex- ploratory data analysis. An analyst, led by an inter- est or question, draws a chart, then a new interest or question comes up and she draws another chart. Through this process, the analyst finds out a char- acteristic behind the data or understands the reason for it. This paper discusses automatic quantitative chart design that supports such interactive exploratory data analysis. That is, a methodology is proposed for taking queries and requests expressed in natu- ral language as input and answering them in charts through organizing that interaction into felicitous dialogue. The objectives of our research are an auto- matic chart design that considers dialogue context, and a dialogue mechanism that uses charts as its …

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