Relative N-gram signatures: Document visualization at the level of character N-grams

The Common N-Gram (CNG) classifier is a text classification algorithm based on the comparison of frequencies of character n-grams (strings of characters of length n) that are the most common in the considered documents and classes of documents. We present a text analytic visualization system that employs the CNG approach for text classification and uses the differences in frequency values of common n-grams in order to visually compare documents at the sub-word level. The visualization method provides both an insight into n-gram characteristics of documents or classes of documents and a visual interpretation of the workings of the CNG classifier.