Have you ever wanted to visualize what words make up a story or other written document? One way to do this would be to use a horizontal bar chart, which is quantitative but this doesn't scale with many words or let you interpret clusters of similar words like you would to see in natural language processing. The common way would be to use a word cloud which is what Jenny's App allows you to do.

Let's generate a word cloud for the text on the front page of MATLAB Answers

I'm surprised to not see "Walter" as the largest value!

Jenny's app allows you to take plain text, a file, or a collection of files and then build the cloud. It also removes common words like "a" and "the". There are also a bunch of options you can use for adjusting the cloud appearance.

Although I like what the App does, and it seems to be very well written with lots of features, there are two things I'd like to see. It would be good to have a command line interface in case you already have a list of words and their occurences to pass into the app. This could save steps and allows you to use multiple words as phrases. Additional documentation on how to use it would be nice too.

Comments

Has anyone ever wanted to use MATLAB for word clouds or do you see a use for word cloud visualization?

Give it a try and let us know what you think here or leave a comment for Jenny.

Get the MATLAB code

Published with MATLAB® R2015b