How to Improve Semantics Understanding of Word Clouds

Abstract

Word cloud is a text visualization technique which is widely applied in helping improve semantic understanding about target materials. One of the most important features is the font size, which represents words frequencies of a document. As the result, in this paper, we explore how to set font sizes of words, and its influence on semantic understanding through people's performance with qualitative and controlled experiments. Adopting an machine learning algorithm LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic model, we quantify semantics of the document and judge participants' accuracy performance. The experimental results show the influence of different font size on semantic understanding performance and provide insights for ways in promoting semantic understanding of word cloud.