An Automatic Document Coloring and Interactive Browsing System
Tomoyuki Uchida

Hidehiko Tanaka

Yun Factory Limited

Department of Electrical Engineering,7{17{10 Koyama Shinagawa-ku,Faculty of Engineering,The University of Tokyo,Tokyo, 142 Japan

7{3{1 Hongo Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113 Japan

1 Introduction

In recent years, the number of online documents, for example WWW, have increased. Nevertheless its expression is still traditional black-and-white. Color devices
such as color CRT are available, and document expressions which make full use of this chromatic faculty is ingreat demand. We will study e ective coloring of documents to increase their legibility and understandability,and develop the automatic document coloring and interactive browsing system CERAS. From an estimation
experiment, CERAS improved the speed and accuracyof reading.

2 Color E ect

There are various psychological e ects of using colors[1].
First of all, color can express up to millions of attributes
human can distinguish. Especially a phenomenon called
pop-out that can discover the stimulus of a purpose ina glance from within a plural stimulus is very e ective.
Next, color can bring the sense of warmness, size, distance and weight. Besides that, color brings feelings suchas beauty and joy, as it is now acknowledged in the advertisement eld. If the e ects of these colors are used
e ectively, it will be expected that a reader can get theoutline of a document faster and understand the content
of a document further and enjoy reading more.

3 Automatic Coloring System `CERAS'

This system gives color to an input plain text and displays it on a CRT. Users can customize the coloring rulesand tune the expression interactively by a GUI.
Morpheme analysis is carried out to sentences in thetext, and coloring points; type of character, part ofspeech and keywords, are extracted. CERAS gives color
expressions to extracted points considering the reader'scustomize information and feedback information fromthe GUI.
CERAS acts in either General coloration mode or Speci c coloration mode. In General coloration mode, documents are colored by general features, such as type ofcharacter and part of speech. Speci c coloration modeis used when a user has a speci c point to read, and theuser can enter this mode anytime, to specify a keywordby clicking the right button of a mouse on it. In thismode, words related to the keyword are also colored byusing a thesaurus. The related words are expressed by
the color whose strength is associated with the strengthof the relation.

4 Estimation of CERAS

Keyword coloration function of CERAS was evaluatedby a news article classi cation experiment. A testee
searches one or two designated descriptions inside a displayed document in speed-reading and classi ed the document into two kinds.
The required time for classi cation is reduced to 24.2%
by coloration. And answer rate is raised by coloration in
3 out of 4 cases. In total, it rises 5% by coloration.
According to the results, in a news article speedreading case, it is presumed that related word colorationis e ective for speed when the number of coloration
marks are less than 3 per line on an average.

5 Conclusion

The number of online documents and those who read
documents on color devices is increasing very much. We
estimated the e ect of coloring a document by experiment, and developed CERAS which generates color expression automatically and responds quickly to the user's
customize and tuning request through a GUI.
In Speci c coloration mode, CERAS has many advantages in fast-reading. From an estimation experiment,
CERAS is e ective for fast-reading of news articles, bothin time and in accuracy in Speci c coloration mode. And
there is enough margin till a defect appears.
Still, there is room of precise estimation and examination, but this system has important signi cance as thetool that estimates the possibility of color expression ofa document.

References[William Winn, 1991] William Winn. Color in Document Design. IEEE Trans. Professional Commun.,vol.34, no.3, pp.180-185, 1991.