Natural Language Generation Plugin in PowerBI

[Anonymous]

I recently found out that PowerBI has the ability to generate insights using an NLG tool called "ARRIA" (https://www.arria.com/).

You can add it to your visualisation by doing the following

1. Click on the three dots.
2. Go to import from marketplace.
3. Search for ARRIA
4. Download the visual.
5. The visual with a yellow box around it is the ARRIA visual. 

You can use it by just clicking on it and adding it to your dashboard. Once you have done that, you can drop in the dimensions and measures you want.  A window with configuration options will appear on the visualisation.

 There are two types of columns:

1. Dimensions - Non-numerical columns  
2. Measures - Numerical columns

Depending on the type of column chosen, the entity type has the following options:

1. If it is a dimension, you can choose between DateTime and Location. If it is left on select, the column would be considered as a string.
2. If it is a measure, it can be Currency. Leaving it on select will consider it as a number.

Once you have made the desired settings on the first page, click on next. On the next page you will be able to customise the type of analysis you require. Based on the fields supplied to the NLG, it will display the available analyses.   

After configuring the above panel, click next. This is the final page where your analysis will be shown. Since I am working on confidential data, I have not shown the generated text. The text can be generated at three levels of detail - Summary, important things and tell me everything, each with increasing complexity.

My take:

I am yet to explore this tool completely but from my initial usage, I think this is a pretty neat tool. The text generated it usually statistical but compared to some other NLG tools I have used, the text and insights generated by ARRIA is pretty great. The language used is also quite sophisticated. I would use this tool to quickly find outliers, trends and skews in the data. I do think they can improve on the time-series analysis front. I faced some issues and couldn't find a way to resolve it easily. 

While this tool needs improvements, it's better than a lot of NLGs out there and the best part is that it is available in PowerBI!

[v-jayw-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Thanks for sharing!

Best Regards,

Jay

[mwegener]

Hi @Anonymous ,

thank you for sharing.