Text visualization service for creating comprehended texts

Abstract

As the growth of the Internet, individuals can transmit text information easily. Though images or movies are also used as mediums, those are hard to be created rather than to create texts information. Since texts on the Web are not always written by professional writers, those may not be coherent or may be hard to be comprehended. Therefore, a service system that supports our text comprehension is required. This paper describes HINATA system that visualizes a text using light and shadow based on topic relevance. Topic is defined as a set of words such as nouns contained in the title of a text. The light expresses sentences related to a topic, and the shadow expresses sentences unrelated to a topic. This visualization method efficiently supports users for finding the parts related to a topic, and for grasping relations between sentences of a text and a topic. Experimental results showed that the proposed system could support users for understanding how a text was related to a topic. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.