User-Centered Text Mining

Historically, text mining methods for extracting "knowledge" from text have increased in sophistication by the incorporation of both statistical learning and symbolic natural language processing. However, in scenarios where a domain user aims to make sense of document collections and derive insights from them, domain knowledge is necessary to inform the analysis, and text mining needs to be complemented by text visualization and user-driven interaction with the analytic process. In this tutorial we introduce Visual Text Analytics as a multi-disciplinary field of research. We cover conceptual and practical methods and tools, review state-of-the-art systems that integrate text mining with visualization and user interaction, and identify promising research directions for making text mining more user-centered and accessible to users with an interest in domain-specific applications.