Visualizing Linguistic Structure

Sunday, 15 February 2015: 1:00 PM-2:30 PM
Room LL21E (San Jose Convention Center)
Miriam Butt, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
The talk features innovative visual analyses for text and speech data. The work presented is the result of a cooperation between visual computing and linguistics.  Visual analytics for  linguistics allows for a comparative analysis of the underlying structure of languages by: a) processing large and complex amounts of data automatically; b) presenting an at-a-glance overview; c) drilling down to individual data points on demand; d) allowing for a dynamic interaction with the visualizations. The sample visual analyses presented include pixel, glyph and sunburst visualizations as well as self-organizing maps and focus mainly on phenomena involving language change over time.  The talk will demonstrate the high potential for a methodological innovative leap within linguistics that an integration of visual analytics offers as well as discuss challenges and difficulties with applying visual analytics to linguistic problems.