Friday, July 19, 2013

v0.1













Here is a screenshot of the first version of TechM (shown on the 'Technology' section tab). The client has been implemented in Ruby on Rails and HTML/CSS, with intentional avoidance of JS for now (ending my philosophical tech debate temporarily). A few things you can't tell from the screenshot:
  • An asterisk (*) next to an entity indicates that the entity represents an entire cluster of similar entities. Hovering over the entity will display the rest of the cluster in a tooltip.
  • Hovering over any entity will display related article titles, also in the same tooltip (this 'feature' is only for creative purposes - it allows me to visualize the importance of article titles with respect to the context of each entity and trending topic, moving forward. I have no intention of showing article titles in a tooltip in a released version of the product, however.)
The second bullet point above really hints at the major advantage of this UI: allowing me to visualize the data in a more sophisticated way than I could previously. This is a nice step up from staring at the data in JSON format.

This version is not good enough for release for several reasons:
  • Obviously, the color scheme is fairly horrendous. I have yet to settle on a good one.
  • Many of these entities aren't useful without more context. Seeing a pile of entities related to each trending topic doesn't inspire me to continue clicking around and exploring the trending topic. This is a huge problem that I clearly need to improve upon.
Here are some thoughts for improvement:
  • Assign weights to clusters based on # of entities in cluster & entity frequencies and show only information related to weightiest cluster, a combination of entities + related articles
  • Only collect the named entities that occur *directly after* the trending topic in an article title... ('meh' on this idea)
  • Use a POS tagger so that instead of showing entire article titles after showing important entities, just show verb phrases
I'm also going to start using git branch to explore these options for how to display the data.

Overall though, it's exciting to have a working prototype of some sort! Even though it is very rough and needs more work.

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