Paper Reading #24: Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso

Reference Information:
Title: Finding Your Way in a Multi-dimensional Semantic Space with Luminoso
Authors: Robert Speer, Catherine Havasi, Nichole Treadway, Henry Lieberman
Presentation Venue: IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary:

A view of the space created by Luminoso

This paper is about the application Luminoso. Luminoso is mainly for research because it can create a space where researchers can analyze mass amounts of data without having to read much. The type of data discussed includes customer feedback for products from surveys or forums. This is helpful because it can help spot patterns and when multiple concerns are mentioned several times.

Luminoso is an interactive application that allows the researcher to input several text documents to analyze. A special action called grabbing allows the user to interact with a section of space and analyze more closely. The space is displayed in 2-D but can be rotated and dragged by user commands.



Discussion:
This application seems really helpful especially for large companies. This type of application would allow companies to send a ton of user surveys or take a lot of feedback and then analyze it quicker. I also like the way the model is displayed. It does not seem too complicating to be able to see what is going on. This may change when hundreds of files are analyzed but from the paper it looks alright.

Picture came from the paper.