Characterizing Uncertainty in the Visual Text Analysis Pipeline

Current visual text analysis approaches rely on sophisticated processing pipelines. Each step of such a pipeline potentially amplifies any uncertainties from the previous step. To ensure the comprehensibility and interoperability of the results, it is of paramount importance to clearly communicate the uncertainty not only of the output but also within the pipeline. In this paper, we characterize the sources of uncertainty along the visual text analysis pipeline. Within its three phases of labeling, modeling, and analysis, we identify six sources, discuss the type of uncertainty they create, and how they propagate. The goal of this paper is to bring the attention of the visualization community to additional types and sources of uncertainty in visual text analysis and to call for careful consideration, highlighting opportunities for future research.