NoteEx: Interactive Visual Context Manipulation for LLM-Assisted Exploratory Data Analysis in Computational Notebooks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Payandeh, Mohammad Hasan, Yuan, Lin-Ping, Zhao, Jian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Payandeh, Mohammad Hasan
Yuan, Lin-Ping
Zhao, Jian
author_facet Payandeh, Mohammad Hasan
Yuan, Lin-Ping
Zhao, Jian
contents Computational notebooks have become popular for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), augmented by LLM-based code generation and result interpretation. Effective LLM assistance hinges on selecting informative context -- the minimal set of cells whose code, data, or outputs suffice to answer a prompt. As notebooks grow long and messy, users can lose track of the mental model of their analysis. They thus fail to curate appropriate contexts for LLM tasks, causing frustration and tedious prompt engineering. We conducted a formative study (n=6) that surfaced challenges in LLM context selection and mental model maintenance. Therefore, we introduce NoteEx, a JupyterLab extension that provides a semantic visualization of the EDA workflow, allowing analysts to externalize their mental model, specify analysis dependencies, and enable interactive selection of task-relevant contexts for LLMs. A user study (n=12) against a baseline shows that NoteEx improved mental model retention and context selection, leading to more accurate and relevant LLM responses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NoteEx: Interactive Visual Context Manipulation for LLM-Assisted Exploratory Data Analysis in Computational Notebooks
Payandeh, Mohammad Hasan
Yuan, Lin-Ping
Zhao, Jian
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computational notebooks have become popular for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), augmented by LLM-based code generation and result interpretation. Effective LLM assistance hinges on selecting informative context -- the minimal set of cells whose code, data, or outputs suffice to answer a prompt. As notebooks grow long and messy, users can lose track of the mental model of their analysis. They thus fail to curate appropriate contexts for LLM tasks, causing frustration and tedious prompt engineering. We conducted a formative study (n=6) that surfaced challenges in LLM context selection and mental model maintenance. Therefore, we introduce NoteEx, a JupyterLab extension that provides a semantic visualization of the EDA workflow, allowing analysts to externalize their mental model, specify analysis dependencies, and enable interactive selection of task-relevant contexts for LLMs. A user study (n=12) against a baseline shows that NoteEx improved mental model retention and context selection, leading to more accurate and relevant LLM responses.
title NoteEx: Interactive Visual Context Manipulation for LLM-Assisted Exploratory Data Analysis in Computational Notebooks
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07223