Task-based Quantitative Evaluation of the Concordance Mosaic Visualization

Abstract

Researchers working in areas such as lexicography, translation studies, and computational linguistics, use a combination of automated and semi-automated tools to analyze the content of text corpora. Concordancing - or the arranging of passages of a textual corpus in alphabetical order according to user-defined keywords - is one of the oldest and still most widely used forms of text analysis. Concordance Mosaic is an interactive concordance visualization which emphasises quantitative information such as word frequency. While Concordance Mosaic is in active use by humanities scholars, no quantitative evaluation of the technique exists. In this paper, the Concordance Mosaic is quantitatively evaluated in comparison to a typical concordance browser. The comparison is evaluated using speed and accuracy on identified corpus analysis actions.