Brent Kievit-Kylar Indiana University

A Visual Word Similarity Tool How can two words be compared? – Similar letters (dog, god) – Similar looking objects (dog, wolf) – Similar context (dog, food) – Similar part of speech (dog, bird) – Similar location ([hot]dog, [hot]potato) – Similar meaning (dog, ?)

Context is Important Two words can be more or less similar depending on the context in which this question is asked. – At dinner: “plate” and “fork” – At baseball game: “plate” and “run” Even if the word is representative of the same object – At play: “paper” and “airplane” – At work: “paper” and “pen”

Natural Language Processing In NLP, we make tools to understand language. Try to make it “think” in the same way as humans do. Many algorithms to learn language representations from data. – No good way to compare algorithms / learning data, or see how well they work.

NLP Visualization Word 2 Word visualizes these word similarity metrics. Network visualization where each word is a node and relations are connecting edges. Easy to see many words and relationships at the same time and compare them.

Visualizing (Step 1) Select “Comparator”. – Choose a similarity comparison algorithm from a list of 24 well known word similarity metrics. – Teach it by giving it text to read. From a document From the web By entering text yourself – Select filters (lower case, web, etc.)

Visualizing (Step 2) Select Words – Many useful tools to select the words you wish to see. – Each “comparator” remembers the words that it has learned.

Visualizing (Step 3) Select Layout and Visualize – Different layout managers make organizing the words simple and powerful. – Words can also be move with the mouse by clicking and dragging. – The world can be moved or zoomed to explore the semantic space.

Sample Results