ggaction: A Grammar of Graphical Actions

2026-09-13

AI Summary

为解决可视化代码难以解读和生成的问题，ggaction通过将图表制作过程建模为函数链来更好地匹配设计意图，提高人机可读性。

Abstract

A chart may be declarative; authoring it is not. Visualization grammars often describe charts as finished specifications, whereas people construct them through a sequence of authoring actions. This mismatch can make visualization code difficult for humans to interpret and for machines to generate from human intent. ggaction addresses this gap by modeling the chart authoring process itself. In ggaction, individual authoring actions are abstracted as functions, and the authoring process is expressed as a chain of these functions. This representation more closely aligns chart designers' authoring intent with code specifications, making the code easily understandable to both humans and machines, including language models. Through a series of evaluations, we show that ggaction is sufficiently expressive to capture common chart authoring intents and outperforms widely used visualization grammars, including Vega-Lite and ggplot2, in both human and machine interpretability. ggaction is available at github.com/ggaction/ggaction.

Problem

• visualization grammars
• chart authoring
• human interpretability
• machine interpretability

Innovation

• chart authoring
• function abstraction
• human and machine interpretability