Visualizing Natural Language Descriptions: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the development of natural language interfaces that generate visual representations of semantic content, highlighting challenges, system examples, and future research directions in AI and visualization.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of 26 graphical systems that translate natural language into visualizations, serving as a reference for future research.

Findings

Identifies key requirements and challenges in visualizing natural language descriptions.

Summarizes 26 existing systems that convert language to visual content.

Highlights the interdisciplinary nature of AI and visualization in this field.

Abstract

A natural language interface exploits the conceptual simplicity and naturalness of the language to create a high-level user-friendly communication channel between humans and machines. One of the promising applications of such interfaces is generating visual interpretations of semantic content of a given natural language that can be then visualized either as a static scene or a dynamic animation. This survey discusses requirements and challenges of developing such systems and reports 26 graphical systems that exploit natural language interfaces and addresses both artificial intelligence and visualization aspects. This work serves as a frame of reference to researchers and to enable further advances in the field.