Multi-document Cohesion Network Analysis: Visualizing Intratextual and Intertextual Links

Reading comprehension requires readers to connect ideas within and across texts to produce a coherent mental representation. One important factor in that complex process regards the cohesion of the document(s). Here, we tackle the challenge of providing researchers and practitioners with a tool to visualize text cohesion both within (intra) and between (inter) texts. This tool, Multi-document Cohesion Network Analysis (MD-CNA), expands the structure of a CNA graph with lexical overlap links of multiple types, together with coreference links to highlight dependencies between text fragments of different granularities. We introduce two visualizations of the CNA graph that support the visual exploration of intratextual and intertextual links. First, a hierarchical view displays a tree-structure of discourse as a visual illustration of CNA links within a document. Second, a grid view available at paragraph or sentence levels displays links both within and between documents, thus ensuring ease of visualization for links spanning across multiple documents. Two use cases are provided to evaluate key functionalities and insights for each type of visualization.