Combining new and existing strategies to improve text-alignment visualization.

1. “Visualizing Textual Data”
Drayton C. Benner
Founder/President, Miklal Software Solutions
PhD Candidate, Northwest Semitic Philology
University of Chicago
DraytonBenner@MiklalSoftware.com

2. Word alignment: uses
• Increases access to the source text (e.g. Hebrew and Greek Bible)
to readers of the target (e.g. English) text
• Commonly used as an input for statistical machine translation
• Also useful to scholars
• Analyzing literary dependence
• Translation technique
• Find usual patterns and deviations from usual patterns
• Reception history
• Ability to find pluses and minuses very easily
• Textual criticism
• Better identification of the source text underlying the translation
• Better macro-understanding of translation technique avoids many mistakes
• Input to algorithmic attempts to reconstruct tree structure of manuscripts
• Lexicography
• Philology
• Linguistics: historical, contact, corpus
• Representation of /ʕ/ and /ɣ/ by ‫ע‬

3. Past visualizations of aligned texts
Source: Logos Bible Software

4. Past visualizations of aligned texts
Source: BibleWorks

5. Past visualizations of aligned texts
Source: esvbible.org

6. Past visualizations by computational linguists
Lines (from Smith and Jahr 2000)
Alignment matrix (from Germann 2007)

7. Past visualizations by computational linguists
Colors (from Merkel et al 2003)
Mouseover (from Germann 2008)

8. Visualization
Language
helps
Colors
Blank rows
Lines