How Does a User Utilize a Chart-based Interface to Conduct Exploratory Data Analysis?

This paper proposes an information retrieval system that utilizes a chart-based interface to support a user's exploratory data analysis. In such analysis, a user tends to examine data to support his/her hypothesis and to seek new perspectives about the data. To conduct this analysis, a user usually overviews data from various viewpoints first, compares multiple data to find differences and similarities among the data, and then accesses the original texts (e.g., newspaper articles) that contain the data. Our proposed system aims to support such a process by providing a chart-based interface, which displays two charts side by side and permits a user to overlay the two charts for comparison and then access the original texts. This paper presents a basic framework of the target task (VisEx), requirements for the task support system, and the details of our proposed system. The result of the users' study conducted in the VisEx task is reported after analyzing the obtained data, which includes log records and post-questionnaire responses.