Automatic Generation of Conversational Interfaces for Tabular Data Analysis

Marcos Gomez-Vazquez, Jordi Cabot and Robert Clarisó
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6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI 2024)
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665577

Abstract

Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources, including support for data analytics questions that are responded via charts rendered by the chatbot. Moreover, our chatbots are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns matched to the chatbot intents and entities.

Keywords

NLP, Chatbot, Data analysis, No-code, Code generation

Cite this paper

@inproceedings{10.1145/3640794.3665577,
    author = {Gomez-Vazquez, Marcos and Cabot, Jordi and Claris\'{o}, Robert},
    title = {Automatic Generation of Conversational Interfaces for Tabular Data Analysis},
    year = {2024},
    isbn = {9798400705113},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3640794.3665577},
    doi = {10.1145/3640794.3665577},
    abstract = {Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources, including support for data analytics questions that are responded via charts rendered by the chatbot. Moreover, our chatbots are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns matched to the chatbot intents and entities.},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces},
    articleno = {33},
    numpages = {6},
    keywords = {Chatbot, Code generation, Data analysis, NLP, No-code},
    location = {Luxembourg, Luxembourg},
    series = {CUI '24}
}