A Survey of Text Alignment Visualization

Text alignment is one of the fundamental techniques text-related domains like natural language processing, computational linguistics, and digital humanities. It compares two or more texts with each other aiming to find similar textual patterns, or to estimate in general how different or similar the texts are. Visualizing alignment results is an essential task, because it helps researchers getting a comprehensive overview of individual findings and the overall pattern structure. Different approaches have been developed to visualize and help making sense of these patterns depending on text size, alignment methods, and, most importantly, the underlying research tasks demanding for alignment. On the basis of those tasks, we reviewed existing text alignment visualization approaches, and discuss their advantages and drawbacks. We finally derive design implications and shed light on related future challenges.