Visualization of Functional-semantic Information: Integrating the Clause and the Discourse

Abstract

In this study, we present our experimental design of an interactive interface that allows users to answer linguistically sophisticated queries utilizing functional-semantic information. Building on previous visualizations of linguistic patterning and discourse structure, the proposed visualization interface presents a unified interface for interrogating the functional-semantic structure of arbitrary texts at different levels of details. To evaluate the effectiveness of the interface, we performed a comparative analysis between visualizations of manual gold-standard annotation and those automatically generated by connecting the interface to existing automatic systems, which revealed remarkable visual correspondence between the two when dealing with small to medium texts. A small-scale case study was then conducted which demonstrated the potential of the resulting tool for effective discovery of interesting patterning in large political texts.