InReAcTable: LLM-powered Interactive Visual Data Story Construction from Tabular Data

Insights in tabular data capture valuable patterns that help analysts understand critical information. Organizing related insights into visual data stories is crucial for in-depth analysis. However, constructing such stories is challenging because of the complexity of the inherent relations between extracted insights. Users face difficulty sifting through a vast number of discrete insights to integrate specific ones into a unified narrative that meets their analytical goals. Existing methods either heavily rely on user expertise, making the process inefficient, or employ automated approaches that cannot fully capture their evolving goals. In this paper, we introduce InReAcTable, a framework that enhances visual data story construction by establishing both structural and semantic connections between data insights. Each user interaction triggers the Acting module, which utilizes an insight graph for structural filtering to narrow the search space, followed by the Reasoning module using the retrieval-augmented generation method based on large language models for semantic filtering, ultimately providing insight recommendations aligned with the user's analytical intent. Based on the InReAcTable framework, we develop an interactive prototype system that guides users to construct visual data stories aligned with their analytical requirements. We conducted a case study and a user experiment to demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the InReAcTable framework and the prototype system for interactively building visual data stories.