Dataflow visualization systems enable flexible visual data exploration by allowing the user to construct a dataflow diagram that composes query and visualization modules to specify system functionality. However learning dataflow diagram usage presents overhead that often discourages the user. In this work we design FlowSense, a natural language interface for dataflow visualization systems that utilizes state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to assist dataflow diagram construction. FlowSense employs a semantic parser with special utterance tagging and special utterance placeholders to generalize to different datasets and dataflow diagrams. It explicitly presents recognized dataset and diagram special utterances to the user for dataflow context awareness. With FlowSense the user can expand and adjust dataflow diagrams more conveniently via plain English. We apply FlowSense to the VisFlow subset-flow visualization system to enhance its usability. We evaluate FlowSense by one case study with domain experts on a real-world data analysis problem and a formal user study.

中文翻译：

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FlowSense：用于在数据流系统中进行可视数据探索的自然语言界面。

数据流可视化系统通过允许用户构建由查询和可视化模块组成的数据流图来指定系统功能，从而实现了灵活的可视化数据浏览。但是，学习数据流图的使用会带来开销，通常会使用户不满意。在这项工作中，我们设计了FlowSense，这是一种用于数据流可视化系统的自然语言界面，该界面使用最新的自然语言处理技术来协助数据流图的构建。FlowSense使用带有特殊话语标记和特殊话语占位符的语义解析器将其推广到不同的数据集和数据流图。它明确地向用户呈现公认的数据集和图表特殊语音，以感知数据流上下文。使用FlowSense，用户可以通过简单的英语更方便地扩展和调整数据流图。我们将FlowSense应用于VisFlow子流可视化系统，以增强其可用性。我们通过与领域专家就实际数据分析问题和正式用户研究进行的一项案例研究来评估FlowSense。