Kostiantyn Kucher

Text visualization techniques: Taxonomy, visual survey, and community insights

Text visualization has become a growing and increasingly important subfield of information visualization. Thus, it is getting harder for researchers to look for related work with specific tasks or visual metaphors in mind. In this paper, we present an interactive visual survey of text visualization techniques that can be used for the purposes of search for related work, introduction to the subfield and gaining insight into research trends. We describe the taxonomy used for categorization of text visualization techniques and compare it to approaches employed in several other surveys. Finally, we present results of analyses performed on the entries data.

The State of the Art in Sentiment Visualization

Visualization of sentiments and opinions extracted from or annotated in texts has become a prominent topic of research over the last decade. From basic pie and bar charts used to illustrate customer reviews to extensive visual analytics systems involving novel representations, sentiment visualization techniques have evolved to deal with complex multidimensional data sets, including temporal, relational and geospatial aspects. This contribution presents a survey of sentiment visualization techniques based on a detailed categorization. We describe the background of sentiment analysis, introduce a categorization for sentiment visualization techniques that includes 7 groups with 35 categories in total, and discuss 132 techniques from peer‐reviewed publications together with an interactive web‐based survey browser. Finally, we discuss insights and opportunities for further research in sentiment visualization. We expect this survey to be useful for visualization researchers whose interests include sentiment or other aspects of text data as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in search of efficient visualization techniques applicable to their tasks and data.

Active Learning and Visual Analytics for Stance Classification with ALVA

The automatic detection and classification of stance (e.g., certainty or agreement) in text data using natural language processing and machine-learning methods creates an opportunity to gain insight into the speakers’ attitudes toward their own and other people’s utterances. However, identifying stance in text presents many challenges related to training data collection and classifier training. To facilitate the entire process of training a stance classifier, we propose a visual analytics approach, called ALVA, for text data annotation and visualization. ALVA’s interplay with the stance classifier follows an active learning strategy to select suitable candidate utterances for manual annotaion. Our approach supports annotation process management and provides the annotators with a clean user interface for labeling utterances with multiple stance categories. ALVA also contains a visualization method to help analysts of the annotation and training process gain a better understanding of the categories used by the annotators. The visualization uses a novel visual representation, called CatCombos, which groups individual annotation items by the combination of stance categories. Additionally, our system makes a visualization of a vector space model available that is itself based on utterances. ALVA is already being used by our domain experts in linguistics and computational linguistics to improve the understanding of stance phenomena and to build a stance classifier for applications such as social media monitoring.

Annotating speaker stance in discourse: The Brexit Blog Corpus

Abstract The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of identifying speaker stance in discourse, provide an analytical resource for it and an evaluation of the level of agreement across speakers. We also explore to what extent language users agree about what kind of stances are expressed in natural language use or whether their interpretations diverge. In order to perform this task, a comprehensive cognitive-functional framework of ten stance categories was developed based on previous work on speaker stance in the literature. A corpus of opinionated texts was compiled, the Brexit Blog Corpus (BBC). An analytical protocol and interface (Active Learning and Visual Analytics) for the annotations was set up and the data were independently annotated by two annotators. The annotation procedure, the annotation agreements and the co-occurrence of more than one stance in the utterances are described and discussed. The careful, analytical annotation process has returned satisfactory inter- and intra-annotation agreement scores, resulting in a gold standard corpus, the final version of the BBC.

BioVis Explorer: A visual guide for biological data visualization techniques

Data visualization is of increasing importance in the Biosciences. During the past 15 years, a great number of novel methods and tools for the visualization of biological data have been developed and published in various journals and conference proceedings. As a consequence, keeping an overview of state-of-the-art visualization research has become increasingly challenging for both biology researchers and visualization researchers. To address this challenge, we have reviewed visualization research especially performed for the Biosciences and created an interactive web-based visualization tool, the BioVis Explorer. BioVis Explorer allows the exploration of published visualization methods in interactive and intuitive ways, including faceted browsing and associations with related methods. The tool is publicly available online and has been designed as community-based system which allows users to add their works easily.

Application of Interactive Computer-Assisted Argument Extraction to Opinionated Social Media Texts

The analysis of various opinions and arguments in textual data can be facilitated by automatic topic modeling methods; however, the exploration and interpretation of the resulting topics and terms may prove to be difficult to the analysts. Opinions, stances, arguments, topics, terms, and text documents are usually connected with many-to-many relationships for such tasks. Exploratory visual analysis with interactive tools can help the analysts to get an overview of the topics and opinions, identify particularly interesting documents, and describe main themes of various arguments. In our previous work, we introduced an interactive tool called Topics2Themes that was used for topic and theme analysis of vaccination-related discussion texts with a limited set of stance categories. In this poster paper, we describe an application of Topics2Themes to a different genre of data, namely, political comments from Reddit, and multiple sentiment and stance categories detected with automatic classifiers.

Analysis of VINCI 2009-2017 Proceedings

Both the metadata and the textual contents of scientific publications can provide us with insights about the development and the current state of the corresponding scientific community. In this short paper, we take a look at the proceedings of VINCI from the previous years and conduct several types of analyses. We summarize the yearly statistics about different types of publications, identify the overall authorship statistics and the most prominent contributors, and analyze the current community structure with a co-authorship network. We also apply topic modeling to identify the most prominent topics discussed in the publications. We hope that the results of our work will provide insights for the visualization community and will also be used as an overview for researchers previously unfamiliar with VINCI.

DoSVis : Document Stance Visualization

Text visualization techniques often make use of automatic text classification methods. One of such methods is stance analysis, which is concerned with detecting various aspects of the writers attitude towards utterances expressed in the text. Existing text visualization approaches for stance classification results are usually adapted to textual data consisting of individual utterances or short messages, and they are often designed for social media or debate monitoring tasks. In this paper, we propose a visualization approach called DoSVis (Document Stance Visualization) that focuses instead on individual text documents of a larger length. DoSVis provides an overview of multiple stance categories detected by our classifier at the utterance level as well as a detailed text view annotated with classification results, thus supporting both distant and close reading tasks. We describe our approach by discussing several application scenarios involving business reports and works of literature. (Less)