Text Mining Tools – more than a search engine.
Text mining isn’t just using your father’s online Boolean-faceted search fields anymore. Today’s standard keyword-based online search engines crawl through pages that someone has already written and which contain information that match certain topic and relevancy criteria. However, text mining tools consist of software that extract and catalogue information from disparate document sources to come up with totally novel and unique ideas that can be the basis for other discoveries and/or decision making.
Text Mining Tools – more than statistical data mining.
And don’t think that text mining is just a subset of data mining. They are both information “hunters and gatherers” but the similarity ends there. According to Professor Marti Hearst of Cal Berkeley’s School of Information Technology, text mining tools search volumes of natural (plain) text rather than discrete facts residing in structured databases.
Even if natural text is arranged in some type of electronic format, how would you go about analyzing all that data in a way that would allow you to come to a conclusion (or decision point) based on textual data contained in dissimilar souces of information? The sheer volume of information might be the greatest task, and sifting through it would be just as daunting. Normal statistical analysis wouldn’t work on unstructured text. Factual data mining must start with the information in structured (i.e., database) forms.
Text Mining Tools – what are the techonologies available?
What would it require for the automated analysis of masses of textual information in order to arrive at actionable conclusions? Software that could manipulate the information in ways that would lead to useful results. Naturally, this would mean the data would already have to be in a machine-readable format. It would also need an ability to not only interpret the text (for each language in which the documents occurred) but to infer the semantical relationships and other nuances of the original text. This is where text mining tools with advanced neural networks and aritificial intelligence (AI) architectures come in. This site will be exploring and reporting on just such text mining tools for our consideration.
