Point Placement by Phylogenetic Trees and its Application to Visual Analysis of Document Collections

TLDR

Visualizing moderate‑to‑large document collections is challenging because it requires accurate distance measures and effective two‑dimensional representations. The paper proposes using phylogenetic tree reconstruction to build visual maps of documents based on content similarity. The method constructs a phylogenetic tree from document similarity, enabling users to retrieve information quickly through the tree’s relationship representation. Experiments on diverse text collections demonstrate improved exploration and clearer visualization of document relationships.

Abstract

The task of building effective representations to visualize and explore collections with moderate to large number of documents is hard. It depends on the evaluation of some distance measure among texts and also on the representation of such relationships in bi- dimensional spaces. In this paper we introduce an alternative approach for building visual maps of documents based on their content similarity, through reconstruction of phylogenetic trees. The tree is capable of representing relationships that allows the user to quickly recover information detected by the similarity metric. For a variety of text collections of different natures we show that we can achieve improved exploration capability and more clear visualization of relationships amongst documents.