Intent Tag Clouds: An Intentional Approach To Visual Text Analysis

Getting a quick impression of the author’s intention of a text is an task often performed. An author’s intention plays a major role in successfully understanding a text. For supporting readers in this task, we present an intentional approach to visual text analysis, making use of tag clouds. The objective of tag clouds is presenting meta-information in a visually appealing way. However there is also much uncertainty associated with tag clouds, such as giving the wrong impression. It is not clear whether the author’s intent can be grasped clearly while looking at a corresponding tag cloud. Therefore it is interesting to ask to what extent, with tag clouds, it is possible to support the user in understanding intentions expressed. In order to answer this question, we construct an intentional perspective on textual content. Based on an existing algorithm for extracting intent annotations from textual content we present a prototypical implementation to produce intent tag clouds, and describe a formative testing, illustrating how intent visualizations may support readers in understanding a text successfully. With the initial prototype, we conducted user studies of our intentional tag cloud visualization and a comparison with a traditional one that visualizes frequent terms. The evaluation’s results indicate, that intent tag clouds have a positive effect on supporting users in grasping an author’s intent.