2 research outputs found
Human-like Time Series Summaries via Trend Utility Estimation
In many scenarios, humans prefer a text-based representation of quantitative
data over numerical, tabular, or graphical representations. The attractiveness
of textual summaries for complex data has inspired research on data-to-text
systems. While there are several data-to-text tools for time series, few of
them try to mimic how humans summarize for time series. In this paper, we
propose a model to create human-like text descriptions for time series. Our
system finds patterns in time series data and ranks these patterns based on
empirical observations of human behavior using utility estimation. Our proposed
utility estimation model is a Bayesian network capturing interdependencies
between different patterns. We describe the learning steps for this network and
introduce baselines along with their performance for each step. The output of
our system is a natural language description of time series that attempts to
match a human's summary of the same data
Everything you always wanted to know about a dataset: studies in data summarisation
Summarising data as text helps people make sense of it. It also improves data
discovery, as search algorithms can match this text against keyword queries. In
this paper, we explore the characteristics of text summaries of data in order
to understand how meaningful summaries look like. We present two complementary
studies: a data-search diary study with 69 students, which offers insight into
the information needs of people searching for data; and a summarisation study,
with a lab and a crowdsourcing component with overall 80 data-literate
participants, which produced summaries for 25 datasets. In each study we
carried out a qualitative analysis to identify key themes and commonly
mentioned dataset attributes, which people consider when searching and making
sense of data. The results helped us design a template to create more
meaningful textual representations of data, alongside guidelines for improving
data-search experience overall