Evaluating LLMs for Visualization Generation and Understanding

Abstract

Information Visualization has been utilized to gain insights from complex data. In recent times, Large Language models (LLMs) have performed very well in many tasks. In this paper, we showcase the capabilities of different popular LLMs to generate code for visualization based on simple prompts. We also analyze the power of LLMs to understand some common visualizations by answering questions. Our study shows that LLMs could generate code for some simpler visualizations such as bar and pie charts. Moreover, they could answer simple questions about visualizations. However, LLMs also have several limitations. For example, some of them had difficulty generating complex visualizations, such as violin plot. LLMs also made errors in answering some questions about visualizations, for example, identifying relationships between close boundaries and determining lengths of shapes. We believe that our insights can be used to improve both LLMs and Information Visualization systems.

References in corpus (5)

• Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
• NL4DV: A Toolkit for Generating Analytic Specifications for Data Visualization from Natural Language Queries
• Towards Natural Language Interfaces for Data Visualization: A Survey
• ChartGPT: Leveraging LLMs to Generate Charts from Abstract Natural Language
• Visualization Generation with Large Language Models: An Evaluation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Evaluating Prompting Strategies for Chart Question Answering with Large Language Models