Thursday, December 4, 2008

What is text mining?

According to Wikipedia: Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the dividing of patterns and trends through means such as statistical pattern learning. Text mining usually involves the process of structuring the input text (usually parsing, along with the addition of some derived linguistic features and the removal of others, and subsequent insertion into a database), deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluation and interpretation of the output. 'High quality' in text mining usually refers to some combination of relevance, novelty, and interestingness. Typical text mining tasks include text categorization, text clustering, concept/entity extraction, production of granular taxonomies, sentiment analysis, document summarization, and entity relation modeling (i.e., learning relations between named entities).

1 comment:

Sean Dobson said...

One thing I missed out is that text mining is all about discovering previously unknown information. Unfortunately not many vendors actually do this or do this well.