DECISIVE ANALYTICS Employee-Owner Alison Smith to Present at ACL 2017

ARLINGTON, Va., July 25, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Next week, Alison Smith, an employee-owner at DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation, is scheduled to present her paper, "Evaluating Visual Representations for Topic Understanding and Their Effects on Manually Generated Labels," at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2017). ACL 2017, the premier conference in the field of computation linguistics, will take place in Vancouver, Canada from July 30^th to August 4^th. The conference focuses on poster sessions, tutorials, workshops, and demonstrations covering a broad spectrum of diverse research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Ms. Smith's paper describes her work in the study of visual representations of probabilistic topic models and what effect they have in promoting end-user understanding of topics. She compared labels generated by users given four topic visualization techniques – word lists, word lists with bars, word clouds, and network graphs – against both each other and automatically generated labels. Her study was done in two phases: a labeling phase, where participants labeled visualized topics, and a validation phase, where different participants select which labels best describe the topics' documents. By looking at participant rating, she was able to determine how well labels describe documents from the topic.

Through her study, Ms. Smith concluded that simple visualization, such as word lists, allowed participants to quickly understand topics, but complex visualizations, despite the added time for comprehension, exposed multi-word expressions that the simpler visualizations would obscure. While automatic labeling does lag behind user-generated labels, the dataset of manually labeled topics highlight linguistic patterns and allows for improvement in automatic topic labeling algorithms.

To learn more about ACL 2017, visit their website http://acl2017.org/

About DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation

DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation is an employee-owned systems engineering company headquartered in Arlington, VA.  Founded two decades ago, DECISIVE ANALYTICS' core ideology is to bring together highly motivated individuals to form an organization that provides superior, innovative technical contributions to all endeavors in which it participates.  We deliver industry-leading products and services to commercial businesses, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and a wide range of other government agencies. For more information, please visit www.dac.us.

SOURCE DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation

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