Visual Text Analytics

The Big Data problem is recognized as one of the global, strategic challenges facing the developed societies of today. Mining, understanding, and using text data is at the centre of Big Data: text is ubiquitous, and its free structure presents challenges far beyond those existing for numerical data analytics. This proposal recognizes that Visual Text Analytics (VTA) is the emerging tool to address Big Text Data. VTA proceeds in a cycle: Analyze first, Show the Important, Zoom, Filter, and Analyze further. The proposed research program will address all the elements of this cycle. We will investigate new linguistically-informed text models, representations and transformations, new text analytics techniques (particularly as the data grows in a never-ending stream), and novel ways to visualize the results of text analytics. Emphasis will be on solutions that scale-up and are verified in real-life, industrially-relevant applications.