Narrative Player: Reviving Data Narratives with Visuals

Abstract: Data-rich documents are commonly found across various fields such as business, finance, and science. However, a general limitation of these documents for reading is their reliance on text to convey data and facts. Visual representation of text aids in providing a satisfactory reading experience in comprehension and engagement. However, existing work emphasizes presenting the insights of local text context, rather than fully conveying data stories within the whole paragraphs and engaging readers. To provide readers with satisfactory data stories, this paper presents Narrative Player, a novel method that automatically revives data narratives with consistent and contextualized visuals. Specifically, it accepts a paragraph and corresponding data table as input and leverages LLMs to characterize the clauses and extract contextualized data facts. Subsequently, the facts are transformed into a coherent visualization sequence with a carefully designed optimization-based approach. Animations are also assigned between adjacent visualizations to enable seamless transitions. Finally, the visualization sequence, transition animations, and audio narration generated by text-to-speech technologies are rendered into a data video. The evaluation results showed that the automatic-generated data videos were well-received by participants and experts for enhancing reading.