H-Matrix: Hierarchical Matrix for visual analysis of cross-linguistic features in large learner corpora

Abstract

This paper presents a visualization technique for cross-linguistic error analysis in large learner corpora. H-Matrix combines a matrix, which is commonly used by linguists to investigate cross-linguistic patterns, with a tree diagram to aggregate and interactively re-weight the importance of matrix rows to create custom investigative views. Our technique can help experts to perform data operations, such as, feature aggregation, filtering, ordering and language comparison interactively without having to reprocess the data. H-Matrix dynamically links the high-level multi-language overview to the extracted textual examples, and a reading view where linguists can see the detected features in context, confirm and generate hypotheses.