The Netspeak Wordgraph

Abstract

The WORDGRAPH helps writers in visually choosing phrases while writing a text. It checks for the commonness of phrases and allows for the retrieval of alternatives by means of wildcard queries. To support such queries, we implement a scalable retrieval engine, which returns high-quality results within milliseconds using a probabilistic retrieval strategy. The results are displayed as WORDGRAPH visualization or as a textual list. The graphical interface provides an effective means for interactive exploration of search results using filter techniques, query expansion and navigation. Our observations indicate that, of three investigated retrieval tasks, the textual interface is sufficient for the phrase verification task, wherein both interfaces support context-sensitive word choice, and the WORDGRAPH best supports the exploration of a phrase’s context or the underlying corpus. Our user study confirms these observations and shows that WORDGRAPH is generally the preferred interface over the textual result list for queries containing multiple wildcards.

Publication

Riehmann, P., Gruendl, H., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B., Froehlich, B. WORDGRAPH: Keyword in Context Visualization for NETSPEAK’s Wildcard Search IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, pp. 1411-1423, Sept., 2012
Preprint, Video

Riehmann, P., Gruendl, H., Froehlich, B., Potthast, M., Trenkmann, M., Stein, B. The NETSPEAK WORDGRAPH: Visualizing Keywords in Context IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium 2011, Hong Kong, March 2011. Best Paper Award
Preprint,