On Building and Evaluating a Medical Records Exploration Interface Using Text Mining Techniques

Medical records contain many terms that are difficult to process. Our aim in this study is to allow visual exploration of the information in medical databases where texts present a large number of syntactic variations and abbreviations by using an interface that facilitates content identification, navigation, and information retrieval. We propose the use of multi-term tag clouds as content representation tools and as assistants for browsing and querying tasks. The tag cloud generation is achieved by using a novelty mathematical method that allows related terms to remain grouped together within the tags. To evaluate this proposal, we have carried out a survey over a spanish database with 24,481 records. For this purpose, 23 expert users in the medical field were tasked to test the interface and answer some questions in order to evaluate the generated tag clouds properties. In addition, we obtained a precision of 0.990, a recall of 0.870, and a F1-score of 0.904 in the evaluation of the tag cloud as an information retrieval tool. The main contribution of this approach is that we automatically generate a visual interface over the text capable of capturing the semantics of the information and facilitating access to medical records, obtaining a high degree of satisfaction in the evaluation survey.

Visual Exploration of Medical Records

Medical records contain many terms which are difficult to process. Our aim in this study is to allow the visual exploration of the information in medical databases where the texts presents a large number of syntactic variations and abbreviations, through an interface which facilitates content identification, navigation and information retrieval. We propose the use of multi-term tag clouds as content representation tools and as assistants for the browsing and querying tasks. The tag cloud generation is achieved through a novelty mathematical method that allows related terms to remain grouped together within the tags To evaluate this proposal, we have used a database with 24,481 records. 23 expert users in the medical field were tasked to complete a survey to evaluate the generated tag clouds properties and we obtained a precision of 0.990, a recall of 0.870 and a F1score of 0.904 in the evaluation of the tag cloud as an information retrieval tool. The main contribution of this approach is that we automatically generate a visual interface over the text capable of capturing the semantics of the information and facilitating access to medical records.

A survey of tag clouds as tools for information retrieval and content representation

Tag clouds are tools that have been widely used on the Internet since their conception. The main applications of these textual visualizations are information retrieval, content representation and browsing of the original text from which the tags are generated. Despite the extensive use of tag clouds, their enormous popularity and the amount of research related to different aspects of them, few studies have summarized their most important features when they work as tools for information retrieval and content representation. In this paper we present a summary of the main characteristics of tag clouds found in the literature, such as their different functions, designs and negative aspects. We also present a summary of the most popular metrics used to capture the structural properties of a tag cloud generated from the query results, as well as other measures for evaluating the goodness of the tag cloud when it works as a tool for content representation. The different methods for tagging and the semantic association processes in tag clouds are also considered. Finally we give a list of alternative for visual interfaces, which makes this study a useful first help for researchers who want to study the content representation and information retrieval interfaces in greater depth.

Comparative study of graphic-based tag clouds: theory and experimental evaluation for information search

PurposeGraphic-based tag clouds aim to visually represent tag content and tag structure, and then to better represent tagged information for later search. However, few studies have clarified the features among varied visualization approaches involved in graphic-based tag clouds and compared them for the purpose of information search.Design/methodology/approachAfter reviewing four kinds of graphic-based tag clouds, an experimental demonstration was conducted in our study to verify how user performs in information search for a general seeking task by using them. Precision ratio, recall ratio, clicks on search and time for search were four variables tested in the experiment. Also, two supplementary tests were respectively carried out to manifest how graphic-based tag clouds contributed to the identification of target tags and tag clusters.FindingsThe experimental results showed that compared to tag content visual tag structure was more important to find related tags from tag clouds for information search. In addition, tag clouds that visually represented the semantic relationships within tags could make user more confident about their search result and carry out a shorter learning process during searching, which signified a tag-based information search path when visual elements were applied.Originality/valueThis research is one of the first to illustrate systematically the graphic-based tag clouds and their impacts on information search. The research findings could suggest on how to build up more effective and interactive tag clouds and make proposition for the design of search user interface by using graphic-based tag clouds.

Tag Clouds for Software Documents Visualization

Legacy software documents are hard to understand and visualize. The tag cloud technique helps software developers to visualize the contents of software documents. A tag cloud is a well-known and simple visualization technique. This paper proposes a new method to visualize software documents, using a tag cloud. In this paper, tags visualize in the cloud based on their frequency in an alphabetical order. The most important tags are displayed with a larger font size. The originality of this method is that it visualizes the contents of JavaDoc as a tag cloud. To validate the JavaDocCloud method, it was applied to NanoXML case study, the results of these experiments display the most common and uncommon tags used in the software documents.

Writing on the wall: Mathieu Tremblin’s ‘Tag Clouds’ and the politics of cultural assimilation

This article explores how French street artist Mathieu Tremblin’s Tag Clouds satirises mainstream French media’s and right-wing politicians’ representations of the French banlieue. As Tag Clouds erases tags and writes over them in a more legible font, I argue that it performs visual sanitisation to satirise the politics and aesthetics of French visual culture affecting urban settings and banlieues. Politicians’ and media’s amalgamation of banlieue with immigration, violence and poverty extends to banlieue visual culture. Tag Clouds’ erasure of tags, I argue, challenges how French visual culture relies on an ‘economy of sameness’ (Brown, 2006) and the formatting of different cultural, racial and political identities into a unique, transparent model of citizenship. Tag Clouds reveals how sameness affects banlieue environments and visual culture. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Tag Clouds ironically calls for recognising the taggers’ ‘right to opacity’ (Glissant, 1990) and their right to refuse to conform to mainstream French visual culture norms.

Web Summarization and Browsing Through Semantic Tag Clouds

The need to manage electronic documents is an open issue in the digital era. It becomes a challenging problem on the internet where a large amount of data needs even more efficient and effective methods and techniques for mining and representing information. In this context, document summarization, browsing processes and visualization techniques have had a great impact on several dimensions of user information perception. In this context, the use of ontologies for knowledge representation has rapidly grown in the last years in several application domains together with social-based techniques such as tag clouds. This form of visualization tool is becoming particularly useful in the interaction process between users and social applications where a huge amount of data needs to have effective and efficient interfaces. In this article, the authors propose a novel methodology based on a combination of ontologies and Tag Clouds for web document collections browsing and summarizing, they call this tool Semantic Tag Cloud.

SAES: An Introduction to Self-Adapting Exploratory Structures

Self-adapting exploratory structures (SAESs) are the basic components of exploratory search. They are abstract structures which allow searching or querying of an information base and summarizing of results using a uniform representation. A definition and a characterization of SAES is given, as well as a discussion of structures that are SAES or can be modified in order to become SAES. These include dynamic taxonomies (also known as faceted search), tag clouds, continuous sliders, geographic maps, and dynamic clustering methods, such as Scatter-Gather. Finally, the integration of these structures into a single interface is discussed.

LibraryThing for Libraries: How Tag Moderation and Size Limitations Affect Tag Clouds

The aim of this study is to analyse differences between tags on LibraryThing’s web page and tag clouds in their “LibraryThing for Libraries” service, and assess if, and how, the LibraryThing tag moderation and limitations to the size of the tag cloud in the library catalogue affect the description of the information resource. An e-mail survey was conducted with personnel at LibraryThing, and the results were compared against tags for twenty different fiction books, collected from two different library catalogues with disparate tag cloud sizes, and LibraryThing’s web page. The data were analysed using a modified version of Golder and Huberman’s tag categories (2006). The results show that while LibraryThing claims to only remove the inherently personal tags, several other types of tags are found to have been discarded as well. Occasionally a certain type of tag is included in one book, and excluded in another. The comparison between the two tag cloud sizes suggests that the larger tag clouds provide a more pronounced picture regarding the contents of the book but at the cost of an increase in the number of tags with synonymous or redundant information.