Cross-domain Visual Exploration of Academic Corpora via the Latent Meaning of User-authored Keywords

Nowadays, scholars dedicate a substantial amount of their work to the querying and browsing of increasingly large collections of research papers on the Internet. In parallel, the recent surge of novel interdisciplinary approaches in science requires scholars to acquire competencies in new fields for which they may lack the necessary vocabulary to formulate adequate queries. This problem, together with the issue of information overload, poses new challenges in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and visualization design that call for a rapid response from the scientific community. In this respect, we report on a novel visualization scheme that enables the exploration of research paper collections via the analysis of semantic proximity relationships found in author-assigned keywords. Our proposal replaces traditional string queries by a bag-of-words (BoW) extracted from a user-generated auxiliary corpus that captures the intentionality of the research. Continuing on the line established by previous works, we combine novel advances in the fields of NLP with visual network analysis techniques to offer scholars a perspective of the target corpus that better fits their research needs. To highlight the advantages of our proposal, we conduct two experiments employing a collection of visualization research papers and an auxiliary cross-domain BoW. Here, we showcase how our visualization can be used to maximize the effectiveness of a browsing session by enhancing the language acquisition task, which allows an effective extraction of knowledge that is in line with the users’ previous expectations.