Word Cloud Explorer: Text Analytics Based on Word Clouds

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,…