Text Mining: The Next Data Frontier - Scientific Computing

From: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles/2014/01/text-mining-next-data-frontier#.UswIHNLuLTo

Mon, 01/06/2014 - 2:04pm
Mark Anawis

By some estimates, 80 percent of available information occurs as free-form text

Text Mining: The Next Data Frontier

Figure 1: Text Mining and Related Fields

Josiah Stamp said: “The individual source of the statistics may easily be the weakest link.” Nowhere is this more true than in the new field of text mining, given the wide variety of textual information. By some estimates, 80 percent of the information available occurs as free-form text which, prior to the development of text mining, needed to be read in its entirety in order for information to be obtained from it. It has been applied to spam filters, fraud detection, sentiment analysis, identification of trends and authorship.

Text mining can be defined as the analysis of semi-structured or unstructured text data. The goal is to turn text information into numbers so that data mining algorithms can be applied. It arose from the related fields of data mining, artificial intelligence, statistics, databases, library science, and linguistics (Figure 1).

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