US 11,797,614 B2
Incremental updates to natural language expressions in a data visualization user interface
Jeffrey Ericson, Menlo Park, CA (US); Vidya Raghavan Setlur, Portola Valley, CA (US); Alex Djalali, Athens, GA (US); Sanaz Golbabaei, Palo Alto, CA (US); Theodore Kornish, Palo Alto, CA (US); Xin Zhao, Mountain View, CA (US); An Shi, Vancouver (CA); Christoph Sachse, Stanford, CA (US); Eliana Leite Goldner, Vancouver (CA); and Suyang Duan, Vancouver (CA)
Assigned to Tableau Software, LLC, Seattle, WA (US)
Filed by Tableau Software, LLC, Seattle, WA (US)
Filed on Aug. 12, 2022, as Appl. No. 17/887,387.
Application 17/887,387 is a continuation of application No. 16/601,437, filed on Oct. 14, 2019, granted, now 11,455,339.
Claims priority of provisional application 62/897,187, filed on Sep. 6, 2019.
Prior Publication US 2022/0382815 A1, Dec. 1, 2022
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. G06F 16/904 (2019.01); G06F 16/9038 (2019.01); G06F 16/9032 (2019.01); G06F 40/30 (2020.01); G06N 5/04 (2023.01); G06F 40/253 (2020.01); G06F 40/211 (2020.01); G06F 16/242 (2019.01); G06F 16/28 (2019.01); G06F 16/26 (2019.01); G06F 16/248 (2019.01); G06F 40/279 (2020.01)
CPC G06F 16/904 (2019.01) [G06F 16/243 (2019.01); G06F 16/248 (2019.01); G06F 16/26 (2019.01); G06F 16/287 (2019.01); G06F 16/9038 (2019.01); G06F 16/90332 (2019.01); G06F 40/211 (2020.01); G06F 40/253 (2020.01); G06F 40/279 (2020.01); G06F 40/30 (2020.01); G06N 5/04 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A method of using natural language for updating visual analysis of datasets, comprising:
at a computing device having a display, one or more processors, and memory storing one or more programs configured for execution by the one or more processors:
displaying, in a graphical user interface, a data visualization and a plurality of phrases that collectively define the data visualization, each phrase of the plurality of phrases including a respective one or more first field names of data fields of a dataset corresponding to the data visualization;
receiving user input to specify a natural language command related to the data visualization;
in response to receiving the user input:
determining that the natural language command includes a metacommand to: (1) add a data field to the data visualization, or (2) remove a data field from the data visualization, or (3) replace a data field in the data visualization with another data field;
determining one or more proposed actions in accordance with the determined metacommand;
generating, for each of the one or more proposed actions, one or more respective phrases corresponding to the respective proposed action;
ranking the one or more proposed actions based on a saliency or weight of a missing term that is inferred from the natural language command according to one or more inferencing rules based on syntactic constraints imposed by a context-free grammar and semantic constraints imposed by attributes of the data fields of the dataset; and
displaying the ranked one or more proposed actions in the graphical user interface;
receiving user selection of a first proposed action of the ranked one or more proposed actions; and
in response to the user selection of the first proposed action:
generating and displaying (1) an updated data visualization and (2) one or more updated phrases in accordance with the first proposed action.