LLM4Vis: Explainable visualization recommendation using ChatGPT

• Main Authors: WANG, Lei, ZHANG, Songheng, WANG, Yun, LIM, Ee-peng, WANG, Yong
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Dataset visualization; Example selection; Feature description; High quality; Human like; Large corpora; Learning-based approach; Machine-learning; Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8330; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9333/viewcontent/2023.emnlp_industry.64.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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 templatebased 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. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/demoleiwang/LLM4Vis.