ConceptVector: Text Visual Analytics via Interactive Lexicon Building Using Word Embedding

Abstract

Central to many text analysis methods is the notion of a concept: a set of semantically related keywords characterizing a specific object, phenomenon, or theme. Advances in word embedding allow building a concept from a small set of seed terms. However, naive application of such techniques may result in false positive errors because of the polysemy of natural language. To mitigate this problem, we present a visual analytics system called ConceptVector that guides a user in building such concepts and then using them to analyze documents. Document-analysis case studies with real-world datasets demonstrate the fine-grained analysis provided by ConceptVector. To support the elaborate modeling of concepts, we introduce a bipolar concept model and support for specifying irrelevant words. We validate the interactive lexicon building interface by a user study and expert reviews. Quantitative evaluation shows that the bipolar lexicon generated with our methods is comparable to human-generated ones.

Publication
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Date

The CommentIQ UI showing toggleable visualizations such as scatterplot, map, and timeline (left) that enable overview and filtering of comments, as well as an adjustable ranking based on various weighted quality criteria (right).ConceptVector supports interactive construction of lexicon-based concepts. Here the user creates a new unipolar concept (1) by adding initial keywords related to tidal flooding (2). The system recommends related words along with their semantic groupings (3), also shown in a scatterplot (4), revealing word- and cluster-level relationships. Irrelevant words can be specified to improve recommendation quality (5). Concepts (9) can then be used to rank document corpora (10). Document scores can be visualized in a scatterplot based on concepts such as tidal flooding and money (7). Users can further refine concepts based on results (8).