We propose a new technique based on program synthesis for automatically generating visualizations from natural language queries. Our method parses the natural language query into a refinement type specification using the intents-and-slots paradigm and leverages type-directed synthesis to generate a set of visualization programs that are most likely to meet the user's intent. Our refinement type system captures useful hints present in the natural language query and allows the synthesis algorithm to reject visualizations that violate well-established design guidelines for the input data set. We have implemented our ideas in a tool called Graphy and evaluated it on NLVCorpus, which consists of 3 popular datasets and over 700 real-world natural language queries. Our experiments show that Graphy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art natural language based visualization tools, including transformer and rule-based ones.

@article{paperbot1475,
  title = {Type-directed synthesis of visualizations from natural language queries},
  author = {Qiaochu Chen and Shankara Pailoor and Celeste Barnaby and Abby Criswell and Chenglong Wang and Greg Durrett and Işil Dillig},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {6},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3563307}
}