Lifting the Fog on Word Clouds: An Evaluation of Interpretability in 234 Individuals

M. P. Maurits, M. P. Maurits, R. Knevel

2022

Abstract

Word clouds are a popular tool for text summary visualisation. By scaling words based on relative frequency, readers should be capable of quickly deducing some of the text semantics. We raise the question whether word clouds truly aid visualisation or rather mislead readers by scaling the wrong text aspect. We evaluated the magnitude of misinterpretation of word clouds using both a traditional font-scaling approach and a novel surface-area-scaling approach. Using an online survey we involved 234 participants, whom we tasked with guesstimating the frequency of 2 words either side of a word with a fixed frequency. We defined an error margin based on the regression slope of the guesstimations with the true frequencies. Clouds were constructed using the font-size or the word-area scaling method, a doubling or a linearly increasing frequency scheme and either words with a constant or increasing length. Errors were compared between settings using Wilcoxon tests. Both word size scaling methods resulted in poor performance of the participants and highlighted great inter-participant variation. Guesstimation accuracy was clearly dependent on the objective complexity of the visualisation. Our survey supports the hypothesis that word clouds are a fickle measure to convey word frequencies in a corpus of text.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Maurits M., Boers M. and Knevel R. (2022). Lifting the Fog on Word Clouds: An Evaluation of Interpretability in 234 Individuals. In Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2022) - Volume 3: IVAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-555-5, SciTePress, pages 123-128. DOI: 10.5220/0010778700003124

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ivapp22,
author={M. P. Maurits and M. P. Boers and R. Knevel},
title={Lifting the Fog on Word Clouds: An Evaluation of Interpretability in 234 Individuals},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2022) - Volume 3: IVAPP},
year={2022},
pages={123-128},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010778700003124},
isbn={978-989-758-555-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2022) - Volume 3: IVAPP
TI - Lifting the Fog on Word Clouds: An Evaluation of Interpretability in 234 Individuals
SN - 978-989-758-555-5
AU - Maurits M.
AU - Boers M.
AU - Knevel R.
PY - 2022
SP - 123
EP - 128
DO - 10.5220/0010778700003124
PB - SciTePress