Visual Interactive Comparison of Part-of-Speech Models for Domain Adaptation

Interactive visual analysis of documents relies critically on the ability of machines to process and analyze texts. Important techniques for text processing include text summarization, classification, or translation. Many of these approaches are based on part-of-speech tagging, a core natural language processing technique. Part-of-speech taggers are typically trained on collections of modern newspaper, magazine, or journal articles. They are known to have high accuracy and robustness when applied to contemporary newspaper style texts. However, the performance of these taggers deteriorates quickly when applying them to more domain specific writings, such as older or even historical documents. Large training sets tend to be scarce for these types of texts due to the limited availability of source material and costly digitization and annotation procedures. In this paper, we present an interactive visualization approach that facilitates analysts in determining part-of-speech tagging errors by comparing several standard part-of-speech tagger results graphically. It allows users to explore, compare, evaluate, and adapt the results through interactive feedback in order to obtain a new model, which can then be applied to similar types of texts. A use case shows successful applications of the approach and demonstrates its benefits and limitations. In addition, we provide insights generated through expert feedback and discuss the effectiveness of our approach