Pre-Conference Talk by VIDANA Gamage Manusha Imesh Karunathilaka | Compendia: AI-Driven Interactive Knowledge Synthesis and Visual Storytelling

In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and human-centred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user's query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user's informational needs. Compendia addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; Data Fact Extraction, which identifies, validates, and refines quantitative facts; Fact Organization, which clusters and merges related facts into coherent thematic groups; and Visual Storytelling, which transforms the organized facts into narratives with visualizations in an interactive scrollytelling interface. We evaluated Compendia through a quantitative analysis, confirming the accuracy in fact extraction and organization, and through two user studies with 16 participants, demonstrating its usability, effectiveness, and ability to produce engaging visual stories for open-ended queries.

This is a Pre-Conference talk for IEEE VIS: Visualization & Visual Analytics (IEEE VIS 2026).
 

Manusha Karunathilaka is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Singapore Management University. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, data visualization, and educational technologies. He is particularly interested in developing AI-driven interactive artifacts that support knowledge synthesis, explanation, and learning. His work has been published in leading venues, including the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG) and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).