ConVis: A Visual Text Analytic System for Exploring Blog Conversations

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 221 - 230
• Main Authors: Hoque, E., Carenini, G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2014
• Subjects: Analysis; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Communication; Conversation; Design engineering; Exchange; Gain; H.5.2 [Information Systems] Information Interfaces and Presentation-User Interfaces; I.2.7 [Natural Language Processing]: Text analysis- Text analysis; Information processing; Interactive; Mathematical analysis; Metadata; Social networks; Studies; Texts; Visual; Visualization
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12378

Today it is quite common for people to exchange hundreds of comments in online conversations (e.g., blogs). Often, it can be very difficult to analyze and gain insights from such long conversations. To address this problem, we present a visual text analytic system that tightly integrates interactive visualization with novel text mining and summarization techniques to fulfill information needs of users in exploring conversations. At first, we perform a user requirement analysis for the domain of blog conversations to derive a set of design principles. Following these principles, we present an interface that visualizes a combination of various metadata and textual analysis results, supporting the user to interactively explore the blog conversations. We conclude with an informal user evaluation, which provides anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of our system and directions for further design.