Technique map

Five techniques recur in the strongest results.

The recurring pattern is a controlled path from ambiguity to evidence. Different environments need different pieces of it.

Constrain

Typed intent or visual IR

Put fields, transforms, encodings, layout, and interactions between natural language and renderer code.

A/B bounded Raiven · nvAgent · NL2Dashboard · NL4DV-LLM · Flint

Can formalize the wrong question or exclude useful forms.

Externalize

Visible state and reversible edits

Keep transformed tables, direct encoding controls, branch history, explanations, and atomic modifications in view.

A small studies Data Formulator 2 · DashChat

Learnability and prototype speed are not long-term correctness.

Ground

Semantic and data contracts

Bind questions to governed measures, field metadata, permissions, verified queries, sample values, and source vintages.

C/D mechanism Power BI · Tableau · Looker

A semantic layer can be stale, wrong, or silent about missing concepts.

Verify

Deterministic work for deterministic claims

Compile, recompute, inspect ASTs, test aggregation and encoding invariants, render in a browser, and record runtime evidence.

B/C repeated Raiven · nvAgent · Vizro · DashArena

Check coverage is partial; “no exception” is not semantic truth.

Observe use

Replay and human acceptance

Give evaluation the rendered artifact, intended task, interaction sequence, resulting state, and a defined human judgment.

A/B frontier DashArena · Data Formulator · DashChat

Model-authored intent is not actual reader behavior.