# Scattertext: a Browser-Based Tool for Visualizing how Corpora Differ

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Scattertext is an open source tool for visualizing linguistic variation between document categories in a language-independent way. The tool presents a scatterplot, where each axis corresponds to the rank-frequency a term occurs in a category of documents. Through a tie-breaking strategy, the tool is able to display thousands of visible term-representing points and find space to legibly label hundreds of them. Scattertext also lends itself to a query-based visualization of how the use of terms with similar embeddings differs between document categories, as well as a visualization for comparing the importance scores of bag-of-words features to univariate metrics.