Visualization of Unstructured Sports Data -- An Example of Cricket Short
  Text Commentary
Swarup Ranjan Behera Vijaya V Saradhi
Sports visualization focuses on the use of structured data, such as box-score
data and tracking data. Unstructured data sources pertaining to sports are
available in various places such as blogs, social media posts, and online news
articles. Sports visualization methods either not fully exploited the
information present in these sources or the proposed visualizations through the
use of these sources did not augment to the body of sports visualization
methods. We propose the use of unstructured data, namely cricket short text
commentary for visualization. The short text commentary data is used for
constructing individual player's strength rules and weakness rules. A
computationally feasible definition for player's strength rule and weakness
rule is proposed. A visualization method for the constructed rules is
presented. In addition, players having similar strength rules or weakness rules
is computed and visualized. We demonstrate the usefulness of short text
commentary in visualization by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of
cricket players using more than one million text commentaries. We validate the
constructed rules through two validation methods. The collected data, source
code, and obtained results on more than 500 players are made publicly
available.