Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. Felix Naumann
 

30.01.2018

Topic-aware Network Visualisation to Explore Large Email Corpora

Tim Repke and Ralf Krestel

Our paper "Topic-aware Network Visualisation to Explore Large Email Corpora" has been accepted for presentation at the International Workshop on Big Data Visual Exploration and Analytics (BigVis 2018) hosted at the 21st International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT). The EDBT 2018 will take place in Vienna, Austria, from March 26th to March 29th, 2018.

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more large datasets exhibit an intrinsic graph structure. While there exist special graph databases to handle ever increasing amounts of nodes and edges, visualising this data becomes infeasible quickly with growing data. In addition, looking at its structure is not sufficient to get an overview of a graph dataset. Indeed, visualising additional information about nodes or edges without cluttering the screen is essential. In this paper, we propose an interactive visualisation for social networks that positions individuals (nodes) on a two-dimensional canvas such that communities defined by social links (edges) are easily recognisable. Furthermore, we visualise topical relatedness between individuals by analysing information about social links, in our case email communication. To this end, we utilise document embeddings, which project the content of an email message into a high dimensional semantic space and graph embeddings, which project nodes in a network graph into a latent space reflecting their relatedness.