Today, online stores collect a lot of customer feedback in the form of surveys, reviews, and comments. This feedback is categorized and in some cases responded to, but in general it is underutilizedeven though customer satisfaction is essential to the success of their business. In this paper, we introduce several new techniques to interactively analyze customer comments and ratings to determine the positive and negative opinions expressed by the customers. First, we introduce a new discrimination-based technique to automatically extract the terms that are the subject of the positive or negative opinion (such as price or customer service) and that are frequently commented on. Second, we derive a Reverse-Distance-Weighting method to map the attributes to the related positive and negative opinions in the text. Third, the resulting high-dimensional feature vectors are visualized in a new summary representation that provides a quick overview. We also cluster the reviews according to the similarity of the comments. Special thumbnails are used to provide insight into the composition of the clusters and their relationship. In addition, an interactive circular correlation map is provided to allow analysts to detect the relationships of the comments to other important attributes and the scores. We have applied these techniques to customer comments from real-world online stores and product reviews from web sites to identify the strength and problems of different products and services, and show the potential of our technique.

Finding suitable, less space consuming views for a document's main content is crucial to provide convenient access to large document collections on display devices of different size. We present a novel compact visualization which represents the document's key semantic as a mixture of images and important key terms, similar to cards in a top trumps game. The key terms are extracted using an advanced text mining approach based on a fully automatic document structure extraction. The images and their captions are extracted using a graphical heuristic and the captions are used for a semi-semantic image weighting. Furthermore, we use the image color histogram for classification and show at least one representative from each non-empty image class. The approach is demonstrated for the IEEE InfoVis publications of a complete year. The method can easily be applied to other publication collections and sets of documents which contain images.

Unprecedented success and active usage of social media services result in massive amounts of user-generated data. An increasing interest in the contained information from social media data leads to more and more sophisticated analysis and visualization applications. Because of the fast pace and distribution of news in social media data it is an appropriate source to identify events in the data and directly display their occurrence to analysts or other users. This paper presents a method for event identification in local areas using the Twitter data stream. We implement and use a combined log-likelihood ratio approach for the geographic and time dimension of real-life Twitter data in predefined areas of the world to detect events occurring in the message contents. We present a case study with two interesting scenarios to show the usefulness of our approach.

This article describes automatic methods and interactive visualizations that are tightly coupled with the goal to enable users to detect interesting portions of text document streams. In this scenario the interestingness is derived from the sentiment, temporal density, and context coherence that comments about features for different targets (e.g., persons, institutions, product attributes, topics, etc.) have. Contributions are made at different stages of the visual analytics pipeline, including novel ways to visualize salient temporal accumulations for further exploration. Moreover, based on the visualization, an automatic algorithm aims to detect and preselect interesting time interval patterns for different features in order to guide analysts. The main target group for the suggested methods are business analysts who want to explore time-stamped customer feedback to detect critical issues. Finally, application case studies on two different datasets and scenarios are conducted and an extensive evaluation is provided for the presented intelligent visual interface for feature-based sentiment exploration over time.

Twitter currently receives about 190 million tweets (small textbased Web posts) a day, in which people share their comments regarding a wide range of topics. A large number of tweets include opinions about products and services. However, with Twitter being a relatively new phenomenon, these tweets are underutilized as a source for evaluating customer sentiment. To explore high-volume twitter data, we introduce three novel timebased visual sentiment analysis techniques: (1) topic-based sentiment analysis that extracts, maps, and measures customer opinions; (2) stream analysis that identifies interesting tweets based on their density, negativity, and influence characteristics; and (3) pixel cell-based sentiment calendars and high density geo maps that visualize large volumes of data in a single view. We applied these techniques to a variety of twitter data, (e.g., movies, amusement parks, and hotels) to show their distribution and patterns, and to identify influential opinions.