Exemplar-based Visualization of Large Document Corpus (InfoVis2009-1115)

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and electronic information services, text corpus is becoming available online at an incredible rate. By displaying text data in a logical layout (e.g., color graphs), text visualization presents a direct way to observe the documents as well as understand the relationship between them. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, Exemplar-based visualization (EV), to visualize an extremely large text corpus. Capitalizing on recent advances in matrix approximation and decomposition, EV presents a probabilistic multidimensional projection model in the low-rank text subspace with a sound objective function. The probability of each document proportion to the topics is obtained through iterative optimization and embedded to a low dimensional space using parameter embedding. By selecting the representative exemplars, we obtain a compact approximation of the data. This makes the visualization highly efficient and flexible. In addition, the selected exemplars neatly summarize the entire data set and greatly reduce the cognitive overload in the visualization, leading to an easier interpretation of large text corpus. Empirically, we demonstrate the superior performance of EV through extensive experiments performed on the publicly available text data sets.