Visualising a Text with a Tree Cloud

Abstract

Summary. Tag clouds have gained popularity over the internet to provide a quick overview of the content of a website or a text. We introduce a new visualisation which displays more information: the tree cloud. Like a word cloud, it shows the most frequent words of the text, where the size reflects the frequency, but the words are arranged on a tree to reflect their semantic proximity according to the text. Such tree clouds help identify the main topics of a document, and even be used for text analysis. We also provide methods to evaluate the quality of the obtained tree cloud, and some key steps of its construction. Our algorithms are implemented in the free software TreeCloud available at http://www.treecloud.org.

A study on human-generated tag structures to inform tag cloud layout

“…Approaches that propose automatic algorithms for generating structured tag clouds include [7,1,16,9,6,13,5]. Most of them approximate what they call the underlying "semantics" or "meaningful relations" between the tags with a cooccurrence-based measure.…”

“…Regarding the layout, i.e., the visual representation of the determined term relations, many different variants have been proposed, e.g., line-wise representations with one line per cluster [7] or with 2D clusters whose terms are spread across multiple lines [18]; network representations [9,6]; tag hierarchies [5]; 2D arrangements in which closeness reflects the relatedness of terms [21,4,15], some of which emphasize clustering structures [3,1]; and SOM-based visualizations [16]. Only few of these suggested visual representations were evaluated with respect to their suitability and appropriateness for the specific task.…”

Txt2vz: A New Tool for Generating Graph Clouds

“…We compare the graph produced by Txt2vz with the ones generated by the Wordle [8] and tree cloud [5] approaches. The three diagrams shown in figures 2, 3 and 4 include many common words, but the presentation is different in a number of respects.…”

“…Trees have been presented as an easy to read and meaningful format and the term 'tree cloud' has been proposed. A freely available system which generates trees based on the semantic distance between words derived from the original text is also available [5].…”

Supporting Moodle-Based Lesson through Visual Analysis

“…In the work presented by Torniai et al the tag cloud employs the size and colour of tags to offer teachers information describing the tags popularity and relevancy [3]. Tree Cloud arranges words on a tree to reflect their semantic proximity according to the text [4]. Despite the significant amount of research on tag clouds, few has been done on how to visualize trends in tag clouds.…”