SemVis: Semantic Visualization for Interactive Topical Analysis

Tuan M. V. Le, Hady W. Lauw

Abstract: Exploratory analysis of a text corpus is an important task that can be aided by informative visualization. One spatially-oriented form of document visualization is a scatterplot, whereby every document is associated with a coordinate, and relationships among documents can be perceived through their spatial distances. Semantic visualization further infuses the visualization space with latent semantics, by incorporating a topic model that has a representation in the visualization space, allowing users to also perceive relationships between documents and topics spatially. We illustrate how a semantic visualization system called SemVis could be used to navigate a text corpus interactively and topically via browsing and searching.