Toward Interface Defaults for Vague Modifiers in Natural Language Interfaces for Visual Analysis

Natural language interfaces for data visualizations tools are growing in importance, but little research has been done on how a system should respond to questions that contain vague modifiers like "high" and "expensive." This paper makes a first step toward design guidelines for this problem, based on existing research from cognitive linguistics and the results of a new empirical study with 274 crowdsourcing participants. A comparison of four bar chart-based views finds that highlighting the top items according to distribution-sensitive values is preferred in most cases and is a good starting point as a design guideline.