Abstract: With the emergence of massive texts,information overload and data redundancy raise great challenges for information processing.To address these issues,text visualization has been proposed for understanding the content,structure and patterns hidden behind complicated textual information.Text visualization integrates several techniques including text analysis,data mining,data visualization,computer graphics,human computer interaction,cognitive science and so on.In this paper,we first introduce the concepts of text visualization.Afterwards,we present the research achievements according to different visualization objects,and introduce typical visualization methods and schemes.As a conclusion,we give an outlook to future research directions of text visualization.