Documentation Matters: Human-Centered AI System to Assist Data Science Code Documentation in Computational Notebooks

Computational notebooks allow data scientists to express their ideas through a combination of code and documentation. However, often pay attention only the code, neglect creating or updating documentation during quick iterations. Inspired by human practices learned from 80 highly-voted Kaggle notebooks, we design implement Themisto, an automated generation system explore how human-centered AI systems can support in machine learning scenario. Themisto facilitates creation via three approaches: deep-learning-based approach generate for source query-based retrieve online API user prompt nudge users write We evaluated within-subjects experiment with 24 science practitioners, found that techniques reduced time writing documentation, reminded participants document they would have ignored, improved participants’ satisfaction computational notebook.