Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Information visualization for text analysis


This article talks about text mining, its visualization and its implications. The authors provide many examples of visualization of text mining and how most of them identify the important entities and then display the relationship among the entities or group visually related items for analysis.

 The next representation of textual information is in the form of concordances where any word of interest is centered and then its context in the document is presented in some visual way. Word cloud and tag cloud visualization are famous forms of text mining visualization.

 I specifically found it interesting that the article points out how text is very difficult to visualize given that it is not a nominal or categorical attribute. One form in which it is handled, is where visualizations represent the frequency of usage of a term(word) against a time series.

An important aspect use of visualizing text mining is representing citation relations and links for research papers. I found the visualization presented by Paperlens both simple and interesting by their use of brushing between views and linking.

In conclusion, the article was a great read, very clear and easy to understand and conveying the importance of visualization for text mining analysis.

0 comments: