Word Cloud Explorer: Text Analytics Based on Word Clouds

Abstract

Word clouds have emerged as a straightforward and visually appealing visualization method for text. They are used in various contexts as a means to provide an overview by distilling text down to those words that appear with highest frequency. Typically, this is done in a static way as pure text summarization. We think, however, that there is a larger potential to this simple yet powerful visualization paradigm in text analytics. In this work, we explore the usefulness of word clouds for general text analysis tasks. We developed a prototypical system called the Word Cloud Explorer that relies entirely on word clouds as a visualization method. It equips them with advanced natural language processing, sophisticated interaction techniques, and context information. We show how this approach can be effectively used to solve text analysis tasks and evaluate it in a qualitative user study.

Experiences during the execution of emergency endodontic treatment and levels of anxiety in dental students

“…A “Word cloud” was generated to graphically represent the discourse analysis. It can be a starting point for a deeper analysis for a body of text, widely used to evaluate qualitative data . The terms with greater popularity and importance were highlighted, improving the interpretation of the data .…”

“…14 A "word cloud" was derived 13 using free software Word Salad (Version 3.16). According to Heimerl et al (2014), word clouds can be employed in qualitative studies, summarising data in large bodies of text. It gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.…”

Retrieving haystacks: a data driven information needs model for faceted search

“…A review of existing literature [23,46,48,[65][66][67] and mainstream search engine user interfaces [109][110][111][112] appears to indicate some deployments are not meeting all the information needs of the BRIDGES model within their facets. These information systems are therefore potentially missing some of the exploratory information needs of its users.…”

“…There is some evidence searchers may prefer line-by-line layouts instead of left to right word cloud displays [67]. Searchers may find simple lists of facet terms faster to scan and navigate [68] than spatial word cloud presentations.…”

Tag clouds with a twist: using tag clouds coloured by information’s trustworthiness to support situational awareness

“…A tag cloud, or word cloud, is a technique used to visualise textual data, where word size, colour or positioning can be used to indicate characteristics of the words (e.g., frequency or prominence) in relation to the text. Considering this ability, a prime application of tag clouds has been the creation and display of summaries of large amounts of text [4]. Our approach aims to combine the summary capability of this technique with our previous work on assessing the trustworthiness of information [7,8], so as to create specialised clouds with words (or parts thereof) coloured according to the trustworthiness of the underlying content (i.e., the different information items used to generate the cloud).…”