This document summarizes a lightning talk about developing a corpus interface called Word Tree. It discusses problems with existing small corpora being difficult to extract data from and available tools being designed for specialists. It proposes extending an existing word tree visualization tool to allow interactive filtering, comparisons, tagging, saving, and distributing states using a larger corpus to address these issues. It outlines a visualisation workflow and testing the interface on a corpus to gather feedback.

1. Lightning Talk, JISC Learnability and Usability Programmme June 1 st , 2011 Word Tree Corpus Interface

2. Problems Small, targeted corpora have been created to support investigation of speech and writing. Difficult to extract data for use elsewhere. Available tools designed for domain specialists : lexicographers and information scientists. Existing corpora underused due to lack of online interface .

3. KWIC: KeyWords In Context if love be rough with you , be rough with love if love be blind , love cannot hit the mark if love be blind , it best agrees with night All instances of “if love” in Romeo and Juliet.

4. ManyEyes Word Tree http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/

5. Approach Extend Word Tree for larger datasets, add asynchronous preprocessing (parsing) stage. Allow users to filter number of terms and metrics interactively, with better fluidity . Introduce comparisons using overlays and/or split screen, test using online and offline User Studies. Allow users to tag, save and distribute interesting visualisation states.

6. Visualisation Workflow Visualising Data (Fry), 2007 User Interface Data Engineering User Studies Log Analysis Online Qualitative Feedback Test features and performance against BAWE Corpus.

7. More details at: thewordtree.net http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/wordtree/