CommAID: Visual Analytics for Communication Analysis through Interactive Dynamics Modeling

Abstract

Communication consists of both meta‐information as well as content. Currently, the automated analysis of such data often focuses either on the network aspects via social network analysis or on the content, utilizing methods from text‐mining. However, the first category of approaches does not leverage the rich content information, while the latter ignores the conversation environment and the temporal evolution, as evident in the meta‐information. In contradiction to communication research, which stresses the importance of a holistic approach, both aspects are rarely applied simultaneously, and consequently, their combination has not yet received enough attention in automated analysis systems. In this work, we aim to address this challenge by discussing the difficulties and design decisions of such a path as well as contribute CommAID, a blueprint for a holistic strategy to communication analysis. It features an integrated visual analytics design to analyze communication networks through dynamics modeling, semantic pattern retrieval, and a user‐adaptable and problem‐specific machine learning‐based retrieval system. An interactive multi‐level matrix‐based visualization facilitates a focused analysis of both network and content using inline visuals supporting cross‐checks and reducing context switches. We evaluate our approach in both a case study and through formative evaluation with eight law enforcement experts using a real‐world communication corpus. Results show that our solution surpasses existing techniques in terms of integration level and applicability. With this contribution, we aim to pave the path for a more holistic approach to communication analysis.

Promoting Ethical Awareness in Communication Analysis: Investigating Potentials and Limits of Visual Analytics for Intelligence Applications

“…Digital communication analysis as a research field has no universally accepted definition, with different understandings in different domains. In this work, we follow the definition by Fischer et al [34], considering it to encompass the computer-mediated [35] analysis of meaningful digital [91] information exchanges between humans [85]. The analysis relates not only to the actual content (text, audio, or video), but also encompasses accompanying meta-data as well as communication network structures.…”

Communication Analysis through Visual Analytics: Current Practices, Challenges, and New Frontiers

“…Another set of approaches uses timeline designs like CloudLines [43], while others like Fu et al [24] modify graph presentations through multiple planes. For a detailed discussion, we refer to previous work [18], where we discuss the existing visual analytics research landscape for communication analysis systems extensively.…”

“…A second option would be to conduct a comparison with similar, existing approaches (e.g., [17]). A third option would be a qualitative interview (e.g., [18]). A fourth option would be a quantitative user study .…”

“…These factors are insufficiently considered the majority of approaches, leading to a black-box analysis. Here it would be possible to include confidence estimates (e.g., [17]), logs, provenance histories (e.g., [18]), data minimization, and other concepts.…”

“…For such communication analysis systems, we notice a peculiar oddity: As we highlighted in previous work [18], and summarize in this paragraph shortly, the research into such systems is split into two fractions: the vast majority of existing approaches focus on either the content of communication or on the network aspect in isolation instead of taking into account the fundamental dynamics holistically. In contrast, this distinction between content and network is not present in the seminal works on human communication research [55,72,78].…”