GraphTide: Augmenting Knowledge-Intensive Text with Progressive Nested Graph

TL;DR

GraphTide is a visualization technique that uses animated, nested entity-relationship graphs to improve understanding of complex knowledge-intensive texts.

Contribution

It introduces a progressive, animated graph construction method with a structure-aware layout to enhance comprehension of complex texts.

Findings

User study shows improved comprehension with GraphTide.

Nested graphs with animation outperform static representations.

The method effectively reveals intra- and inter-sentence relationships.

Abstract

Knowledge-intensive text usually contains fruitful entities and complex relationships, such as academic articles and scientific exposition. Reading and comprehending such texts often demands considerable time and mental effort to track the relationships between entities. To reduce the burden, we present GraphTide, a visualization technique that progressively constructs nested entity-relationship graphs with animation to support the understanding of complex text. Our method features an on-demand entity-relationship decomposition pipeline that constructs nested graphs to represent intra- and inter-sentence relationships. Moreover, we propose a structure-aware force-directed layout optimization algorithm to enhance structural clarity. Sentences and their associated entities are incrementally revealed through animated transitions, helping users maintain context as the narrative unfolds. A user study shows that GraphTide significantly improves users' comprehension of knowledge-intensive texts compared to traditional graph-based techniques and static nested graph representations.