Text Mining

An alert reader will make connections between seemingly unrelated facts to generate new ideas or hypotheses. However, the burgeoning growth of published text means that even the most avid reader cannot hope to keep up with all the reading in a field, let alone adjacent fields. Nuggets of insight or new knowledge are at risk of languishing undiscovered in the literature. Text mining offers a solution to this problem by replacing or supplementing the human reader with automatic systems undeterred by the text explosion. It involves analysing a large collection of documents to discover previously unknown information. The information might be relationships or patterns that are buried in the document collection and which would otherwise be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discover. Text mining can be used to analyse natural language documents about any subject, although much of the interest at present is coming from the biological sciences.