A Survey of Text Alignment Visualization

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Tariq Yousef, Stefan Jänicke

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 View presentation:2020-10-28T14:30:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-28T14:30:00Z

Exemplar figure — Three text alignment scenarios focusing on Hamlet’s Soliloquy: (a) collation scenario shows alignment of similar or equal lines among the Quarto Q1 and First Folio editions of Hamlet, (b) text re-use scenario highlights variants of the ”To be, or not to be”-quote in three different texts of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the straight line indicates an exact quote, variants are linked with dashed lines), and (c) translation scenario links different translations of ”not to be” in the first line of the speech (in Uzbek, ”not to be” translates to death).

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Keywords

Text Alignment, Text Visualization, Collation, Text Re-Use, Plagiarism Analysis, Translation Studies

Abstract

Text alignment is one of the fundamental techniques text-related domains like natural language processing, computational linguistics, and digital humanities. It compares two or more texts with each other aiming to find similar textual patterns, or to estimate in general how different or similar the texts are. Visualizing alignment results is an essential task, because it helps researchers getting a comprehensive overview of individual findings and the overall pattern structure. Different approaches have been developed to visualize and help making sense of these patterns depending on text size, alignment methods, and, most importantly, the underlying research tasks demanding for alignment. On the basis of those tasks, we reviewed existing text alignment visualization approaches, and discuss their advantages and drawbacks. We finally derive design implications and shed light on related future challenges.