A User-Centric Taxonomy for Visualization-Oriented Natural Language Interfaces

Data analysis is an important success factor for many companies and organizations today. Faced with the challenges of ever-increasing data volumes and the lack of specially trained data analysts, the importance of user-friendly data visualization tools has increased. Natural language processing has enabled a more barrier free way of interacting with data in the form of visualization-oriented natural language interfaces (V-NLIs). In recent years various approaches of these systems have shown up in the literature. In this paper we present a methodically derived taxonomy that allows a classification of these approaches in terms of their user interaction. The results help scientists and practitioners to gain an overview of the field and assist them in making design decisions.