Wu, YingcaiProvan, ThomasWei, FuruLiu, ShixiaMa, Kwan-LiuH. Hauser, H. Pfister, and J. J. van Wijk2014-02-212014-02-2120111467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.01923.xWord clouds are proliferating on the Internet and have received much attention in visual analytics. Although word clouds can help users understand the major content of a document collection quickly, their ability to visually compare documents is limited. This paper introduces a new method to create semantic-preserving word clouds by leveraging tailored seam carving, a well-established content-aware image resizing operator. The method can optimize a word cloud layout by removing a left-to-right or top-to-bottom seam iteratively and gracefully from the layout. Each seam is a connected path of low energy regions determined by a Gaussian-based energy function. With seam carving, we can pack the word cloud compactly and effectively, while preserving its overall semantic structure. Furthermore, we design a set of interactive visualization techniques for the created word clouds to facilitate visual text analysis and comparison. Case studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our techniques.I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]Methodology and TechniquesInteraction Techniques