Natural language-based user guidance for knowledge graph exploration: a user study

Abstract

Large knowledge graphs hold the promise of helping knowledge workers in their tasks by answering simple and complex questions in specialised domains. However, searching and exploring knowledge graphs in current practice still requires knowledge of certain query languages such as SPARQL or Cypher, which many untrained end users do not possess. Approaches for more user-friendly exploration have been proposed and range from natural language querying over visual cues up to query-by-example mechanisms, often enhanced with recommendation mechanisms offering guidance. We observe, however, a lack of user studies indicating which of these approaches lead to a better user experience and optimal exploration outcomes. In this work, we make a step towards closing this gap by conducting a qualitative user study with a system that relies on formulating queries in natural language and providing answers in the form of subgraph visualisations. Our system is able to offer guidance via query recommendations based on a current context. The user study evaluates the impact of this guidance in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness (recall) of user sessions. We find that both aspects are improved, especially since query recommendations provide inspiration, leading to a larger number of insights discovered in roughly the same time.