English

Cartolabe: A Web-Based Scalable Visualization of Large Document Collections

Human-Computer Interaction 2020-10-20 v2

Abstract

We describe CARTOLABE, a web-based multi-scale system for visualizing and exploring large textual corpora based on topics, introducing a novel mechanism for the progressive visualization of filtering queries. Initially designed to represent and navigate through scientific publications in different disciplines, CARTOLABE has evolved to become a generic framework and accommodate various corpora, ranging from Wikipedia (4.5M entries) to the French National Debate (4.3M entries). CARTOLABE is made of two modules: the first relies on Natural Language Processing methods, converting a corpus and its entities (documents, authors, concepts) into high-dimensional vectors, computing their projection on the 2D plane, and extracting meaningful labels for regions of the plane. The second module is a web-based visualization, displaying tiles computed from the multidimensional projection of the corpus using the U MAP projection method. This visualization module aims at enabling users with no expertise in visualization and data analysis to get an overview of their corpus, and to interact with it: exploring, querying, filtering, panning and zooming on regions of semantic interest. Three use cases are discussed to illustrate CARTOLABE's versatility and ability to bring large scale textual corpus visualization and exploration to a wide audience.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.00975,
  title  = {Cartolabe: A Web-Based Scalable Visualization of Large Document Collections},
  author = {Caillou Philippe and Renault Jonas and Fekete Jean-Daniel and Letournel Anne-Catherine and Sebag Michèle},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.00975},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:00:34.577Z