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‘interHist’ - an interactive visual interface for corpus exploration

In this article, we present interHist, a compact visualization for the interactive exploration of results to complex corpus queries. Integrated with a search interface to the PAISA corpus of Italian web texts, interHist aims at facilitating the exploration of large results sets to linguistic corpus searches. This objective is approached by providing an interactive visual overview of the data, which supports the user-steered navigation by means of interactive filtering. It allows to dynamically switch between an overview on the data and a detailed view on results in their immediate textual context, thus helping to detect and inspect relevant hits more efficiently. We provide background information on corpus linguistics and related work on visualizations for language and linguistic data. We introduce the architecture of interHist, by detailing the data structure it relies on, describing the visualization design and providing technical details of the implementation and its integration with the corpus querying environment. Finally, we illustrate its usage by presenting a use case for the analysis of the composition of Italian noun phrases.