Barbara di Eugenio: Towards a Dialogue System that supports Rich Visualizations of Data

We are more than happy to introduce a new series of talks to Penn State and host our first speaker for the joint CSE/IST Colloquium on Natural Language Processing!

Towards a Dialogue System that supports Rich Visualizations of Data

The goal of the Articulate system is that of supporting a full-fledged conversation between a user and a system that transforms language queries into visualizations of data on large displays. So far, we have collected a corpus where users explore crime data from the city of Chicago via visualizations; we annotated the corpus for user intentions;  and we have developed the core natural language-to-visualization pipeline  which is able to process a sequence of requests, create the corresponding visualizations, position them on the screen, and manage them. The pipeline starts by classifying the input request into one of six types, then parsing it and applying semantic role labeling; first a logical form, then a SQL query and finally a visualization specification is derived.

Barbara di Eugenio is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her main area of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP), and its application to human-computer interaction, educational technology, human-robot interaction, and multimedia systems. Her goal is to use NLP to support both education and instruction, and collaboration between human or artificial agents. The theoretical aspects of her research concern the linguistic analysis, and the knowledge representation and reasoning that support the understanding and generation of NL discourse and dialogue. Her research has its empirical foundations in both qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis, including data mining techniques.

Find the story on Penn State News here.