Visualization of Social Net

This is a technical problem related to one of the term projects in Information Extraction 10-707 in Fall 2010.

Visual representation of social networks is important to understand the network data and convey the result of the analysis [1]. Most of the softwares have besides the analytical tools also modules for network visuaization. Exploration of the data is done through displaying nodes and ties in various layouts, and attributing colors, size and other advanced properties to nodes.

Typical representation of the network data are graphs in network layout (nodes and ties). These are not very easy-to-read and do not allow an intuitive interpretation. Various new methods have been developed in order to display network data in more intuitive format (e.g. Sociomapping [2]).

State of the art

Currently there are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. In particular, we are interested in the visualization for social network. Some of the best examples include a visualization of connections in last.fm, a visualization of relationships for youtube videos, a visualization tools for related items in Amazon etc. [3]

In order to develop visualization for social net, people usually use third party tools, one of the most popular tools in academia is the prefuse toolkit from University of California at Berkeley [4]. We adopted prefuse for developing our own tool of visualizing the Cross-Document Co-reference results.

Our Progress

We have been focused on this task since the summer of 2010, our overall objective is:

• To serve as an interface to our Cross Document Co-reference system

We design our Cross Document Co-reference system as a pipeline process of a Within-Document Co-reference process which produces chains of mentions for every document, a Cross-Document Co-reference process to cluster the chain together pair by pair and a visualization tool as the user interface to view the output of the entire system. The visualization tool currently has the following three features:

1) Visualizing the graph of entities

2) Visualizing the profile of entities

3) Visualizing the connection of entity groups

• To serve as an analytical tool for business intelligence or forensics purpose.

Potential Improvement

Our tool continues to evolve, mainly in these three different directions: (1) adding entity lifeline; (2) adding occurrence of the entity; (3) highlighting the entities of interests.