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, 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.