Design and Evaluation of Visualization Techniques to Facilitate Argument Exploration

Abstract

This paper reports the design and comparison of three visualizations to represent the structure and content within arguments.
Arguments are artifacts of reasoning widely used across domains such as education, policy making, and science. An argument
is made up of sequences of statements (premises) which can support or contradict each other, individually or in groups through
Boolean operators. Understanding the resulting hierarchical structure of arguments while being able to read the arguments’text
poses problems related to overview, detail, and navigation. Based on interviews with argument analysts we iteratively designed
three techniques, each using combinations of tree visualizations (sunburst, icicle), content display (in-situ, tooltip) and interactive
navigation. Structured discussions with the analysts show benefits of each these techniques; for example, sunburst being good in
presenting overview but showing arguments in-situ is better than pop-ups. A controlleduser study with 21 participants and three
tasks shows complementary evidence suggesting that a sunburst with pop-up for the content is the best trade-off solution. Our
results can inform visualizations within existing argument

 

EuroVis 2022 Talk