LLM4Vis: Explainable Visualization Recommendation using ChatGPT

Lei Wang, Songheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Ee-Peng Lim, Yong Wang


Abstract
Data visualization is a powerful tool for exploring and communicating insights in various domains. To automate visualization choice for datasets, a task known as visualization recommendation has been proposed. Various machine-learning-based approaches have been developed for this purpose, but they often require a large corpus of dataset-visualization pairs for training and lack natural explanations for their results. To address this research gap, we propose LLM4Vis, a novel ChatGPT-based prompting approach to perform visualization recommendation and return human-like explanations using very few demonstration examples. Our approach involves feature description, demonstration example selection, explanation generation, demonstration example construction, and inference steps. To obtain demonstration examples with high-quality explanations, we propose a new explanation generation bootstrapping to iteratively refine generated explanations by considering the previous generation and template-based hint. Evaluations on the VizML dataset show that LLM4Vis outperforms or performs similarly to supervised learning models like Random Forest, Decision Tree, and MLP, in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. The qualitative evaluation also shows the effectiveness of explanations generated by LLM4Vis.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-industry.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Mingxuan Wang, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
675–692
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-industry.64
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-industry.64
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lei Wang, Songheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Ee-Peng Lim, and Yong Wang. 2023. LLM4Vis: Explainable Visualization Recommendation using ChatGPT. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 675–692, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM4Vis: Explainable Visualization Recommendation using ChatGPT (Wang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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