KWISC — Dependency visualization for understanding context

We propose a dependency visualization method for understanding context, KWISC. KWISC displays dependency between bunsetsus in Japanese sentences. In particular, it splits sentences into bunsetsus and displays them hierarchically according to the depth of dependency, to understand context. In addition, KWISC is able to align two keywords respectively, while KWIC aligns one keyword. This helps to find collocations among words. Furthermore, KWISC is able to expand and collapse bunsetsus. It can shorten distances of collocating words since it shows only the main structure of sentences by collapsing the bunsetsus. Therefore, collocating words are easy to fit on the screen, and horizontal eye movement is decreased when we look for collocations. As an evaluation experiment, we have collected pairs consisting of a bunsetsu that includes a keyword and another bunsetsu on which it depends from 207,802 sentences in the EDR corpus, and have measured the distances between them in KWISC. As a result, it is confirmed that KWISC makes the distances shorter than the conventional methods, and we have shown that KWISC makes it easy to find collocations.