Visual interactive creation and validation of text clustering workflows to explore document collections

The exploration of text document collections is a complex and cumbersome task. Clustering techniques can help to group documents based on their content for the generation of overviews. However, the underlying clustering workflows comprising preprocessing, feature selection, clustering algorithm selection and parameterization offer several degrees of freedom. Since no "best" clustering workflow exists, users have to evaluate clustering results based on the data and analysis tasks at hand. In our approach, we present an interactive system for the creation and validation of text clustering workflows with the goal to explore document collections. The system allows users to control every step of the text clustering workflow. First, users are supported in the feature selection process via feature selection metrics-based feature ranking and linguistic filtering (e.g., part-of-speech filtering). Second, users can choose between different clustering methods and their parameterizations. Third, the clustering results can be explored based on the cluster content (documents and relevant feature terms), and cluster quality measures. Fourth, the results of different clusterings can be compared, and frequent document subsets in clusters can be identified. We validate the usefulness of the system with a usage scenario describing how users can explore document collections in a visual and interactive way.