Designing a Visualization to Facilitate Discussion Between Opposing Views

Readers often encounter online articles that argue opposite sides of the same topic. Discussing these topics can be a difficult task, especially when trying to find common ground within disagreement. We present a visualization that helps people compare opposing views. We use large language models (LLMs) to generate summaries of two articles, each presenting a viewpoint on the same topic. From these summaries, we create a pros and cons visualization that uses shapes, colors, and representative text to denote the different views. In a preliminary user study, we explored whether this visualization helps facilitate discussion and supports reaching a statement two people can agree with. The results suggest that the visualization was useful overall for discussing a topic, and also indicate several ways it could be improved.