Abstract
The goal of the research presented in this paper is to support users in exploring a large amount of data for the purpose of decision-making and problem-solving. Our approach is to design human-computer interaction as a natural discourse between the user who explores the data, and the system that interprets the user's query, retrieves data based on the query, and presents the result. InTREND (an Interactive Tool for Reflective Exploration through Natural Discourse) supports this type of interaction by (1) interpreting the user's query represented in a natural language, (2) composing a graph, based on the interpreted query, for retrieved data, and (3) presenting an animated graph for the retrieval results. InTREND encourages iterative exploration by maintaining the context of past interactions and uses this context to improve discourse with the user. The paper describes our research motivation, presents a natural discourse framework, and explains the InTREND system. Our user studies evaluate the context preservation mechanisms of InTREND.
