Comparative Visual Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Features

Approaches in Visual Analytics have so far been developed for a wide array of research areas, mainly with a focus on industrial or business applications. The field of linguistics, however, has only marginally incorporated visualizations in its research, e.g. using simple tree representations, attribute-value matrices or network analyses. This paper suggests a new interesting field of application demonstrating how Visual Analytics is able to support linguists in their research. We show this with respect to one concrete linguistic phenomenon, named Vowel Harmony, where visual analysis allows an at-a-glance comparison across a variety of languages. Our approach covers the entire pipeline of Visual Analytics methodology: data processing, feature extraction and the creation of an interactive visual representation. Our results allow for a novel approach to linguistic investigation in that we enable an at-a-glance analysis of whether vowel harmony is present in a language and, beyond that, a precise indication of the particular type of vowel interdependence and patterning in a given language.