Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Reaction: Information Visualization for Text Analysis

This was an interesting read. It deals with applications in the field of Text mining which involve visualizing connections among entities within and across documents, methods for visualization occurrences of words or phrases within documents and visualizing relationships between words in their usage in language and in lexical ontologies.

As discussed in the first section of the article that one of the most common strategies used in text mining is identifying the major entities within the text and attempt to show connections among those entities. This is explained by giving an example figure 11.1. I think this is a pattern followed most commonly followed by everyone in the field of visualization. Whenever you look at a social networking site or any other site that deals with lots of objects, people generally tend to find the major entities and relationship among them.

This is an article with lots of example and pictures so it was very easy to connect with the read as its always easier to understand graphical visualizations. I found the examples given in figures 11.3 and 11.4 the most interesting. 11.3 deals with The BETA system for exploring document collections, showing results listings for the query web fountain on the right, augmented with TileBars, and entity frequency information plotted along the left hand side and 11.4 deals with the TRIST interface.

I think overall it was an interesting chapter giving good knowledge about various visualizations used to represent textual data.

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