A dynamic approach for visualizing and exploring concept hierarchies from textbooks

Abstract

In this study, we propose a visualization technique to explore and visualize concept hierarchies generated from a textbook in the legal domain. Through a human-centered design process, we developed a tool that allows users to effectively navigate through and explore complex hierarchical concepts in three kinds of traversal techniques: top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up. Our concept hierarchies offer an overview over a given domain, with increasing level of detail toward the bottom of the hierarchy which is consisting of entities. In the legal use case we considered, the concepts were adapted from section headings in a legal textbook, whereas references to law or legal cases inside the textbook became entities. The design of this tool is refined following various steps such as gathering user needs, pain points of an existing visualization, prototyping, testing, and refining. The resulting interface offers users several key features such as dynamic search and filter, explorable concept nodes, and a preview of leaf nodes at every stage. A high-fidelity prototype was created to test our theory and design. To test our concept, we used the System Usability Scale as a way to measure the prototype's usability, a task-based survey to asses the tool's ability in assisting users in gathering information and interacting with the prototype, and finally mouse tracking to understand user interaction patterns. Along with this, we gathered audio and video footage of users when participating in the study. This footage also helped us in getting feedback when the survey responses required further information. The data collected provided valuable insights to set the directions for extending this study. As a result, we have accounted for varying hierarchy depths, longer text spans than only one to two words in the elements of the hierarchy, searchability, and exploration of the hierarchies. At the same time, we aimed for minimizing visual clutter and cognitive overload. We show that existing approaches are not suitable to visualize the type of data which we support with our visualization.