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The influence of font scale on semantic expression of word cloud

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Abstract

Word cloud is a common text visualization technique. With the ability of presenting the keywords of a document in a direct way, it has been widely applied in many real-world situations. However, to better represent the main idea of a document, a critical aspect for word cloud design is to set an appropriate font size to facilitate semantic expression. In this paper, we explore the influence of font scale on semantic expression and evaluate font size of word cloud in a more systematic approach. To quantify semantic information of a document, we utilize an LDA ensemble-based method to support interactive selection of topics and obtain the semantics of documents in a scientific way. We conducted two pilot studies to decide important attributes of word clouds for the formal study. Through formal study 1, we find that the scale affects the semantic expression of word cloud, including accuracy, time and confidence in making judgments. In study 2, we explored different semantic expression patterns of word clouds under different document categories. Our findings aimed at optimizing the scale of word cloud and improving its semantic expressing ability.

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Acknowledgements

The work was partially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2018YFC0831700) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61972278).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Lu Yang, Jie Li & Wenhuan Lu

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Technology for Food Safety, Beijing Technology and Business University, Fangshan, China

    Yi Chen

  3. The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, USA

    Kang Zhang

  4. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Yan Li

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  1. Lu Yang
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  2. Jie Li
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  3. Wenhuan Lu
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  4. Yi Chen
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  5. Kang Zhang
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  6. Yan Li
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Correspondence to Yan Li.

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Yang, L., Li, J., Lu, W. et al. The influence of font scale on semantic expression of word cloud. J Vis 23, 981–998 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-020-00678-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-020-00678-3

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