Methods, systems, and non-transitory computer readable media are disclosed for intelligently generating comprehensive and relevant visual data stories from tabular data. The disclosed system can create data stories from a given dataset guided by some user selections to set a theme for the story. In particular, the disclosed system evaluates facts of a dataset to identify significant facts. The disclosed system can order significant facts to create a backbone for the data story based on user selections by utilizing a beam search. Furthermore, the disclosed system can expand the backbone of the data story by generating coherence facts. The disclosed system may present the generated story via a graphical user interface.