An Investigation into an Always Listening Interface to Support Data Exploration

Natural Language Interfaces that facilitate data exploration tasks are rapidly gaining in interest in the research community because they enable users to focus their attention on the task of inquiry rather than the mechanics of chart construction. Yet, current systems rely solely on processing the user’s explicit commands to generate the user’s intended chart. These commands can be ambiguous due to natural language tendencies such as speech disfluency and underspecification. In this paper, we developed and studied how an always listening interface can help contextualize imprecise queries. Our study revealed that an always listening interface is able to use an on-going conversation to fill in missing properties for imprecise commands, disambiguate inaccurate commands without asking the user for clarification, as well as generate charts without being explicitly asked.