Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from different written resources." [1] Written resources may include websites, books, emails, reviews, and articles. High-quality information is typically obtained by devising patterns and trends by means such as statistical pattern learning. According to Hotho et al. (2005), there are three perspectives of text mining: information extraction, data mining, and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD). [2] 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 interest. 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).
Text analysis involves information retrieval, lexical analysis to study word frequency distributions, pattern recognition, tagging/annotation, information extraction, data mining techniques including link and association analysis, visualization, and predictive analytics. The overarching goal is, essentially, to turn text into data for analysis, via the application of natural language processing (NLP), different types of algorithms and analytical methods. An important phase of this process is the interpretation of the gathered information.
A typical application is to scan a set of documents written in a natural language and either model the document set for predictive classification purposes or populate a database or search index with the information extracted. The document is the basic element when starting with text mining. Here, we define a document as a unit of textual data, which normally exists in many types of collections. [3]
Text analytics describes a set of linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation. [4] The term is roughly synonymous with text mining; indeed, Ronen Feldman modified a 2000 description of "text mining" [5] in 2004 to describe "text analytics". [6] The latter term is now used more frequently in business settings while "text mining" is used in some of the earliest application areas, dating to the 1980s, [7] notably life-sciences research and government intelligence.
The term text analytics also describes that application of text analytics to respond to business problems, whether independently or in conjunction with query and analysis of fielded, numerical data. It is a truism that 80% of business-relevant information originates in unstructured form, primarily text. [8] These techniques and processes discover and present knowledge – facts, business rules, and relationships – that is otherwise locked in textual form, impenetrable to automated processing.
Subtasks—components of a larger text-analytics effort—typically include:
Text mining technology is now broadly applied to a wide variety of government, research, and business needs. All these groups may use text mining for records management and searching documents relevant to their daily activities. Legal professionals may use text mining for e-discovery, for example. Governments and military groups use text mining for national security and intelligence purposes. Scientific researchers incorporate text mining approaches into efforts to organize large sets of text data (i.e., addressing the problem of unstructured data), to determine ideas communicated through text (e.g., sentiment analysis in social media [14] [15] [16] ) and to support scientific discovery in fields such as the life sciences and bioinformatics. In business, applications are used to support competitive intelligence and automated ad placement, among numerous other activities.
Many text mining software packages are marketed for security applications, especially monitoring and analysis of online plain text sources such as Internet news, blogs, etc. for national security purposes. [17] It is also involved in the study of text encryption/decryption.
A range of text mining applications in the biomedical literature has been described, [19] including computational approaches to assist with studies in protein docking, [20] protein interactions, [21] [22] and protein-disease associations. [23] In addition, with large patient textual datasets in the clinical field, datasets of demographic information in population studies and adverse event reports, text mining can facilitate clinical studies and precision medicine. Text mining algorithms can facilitate the stratification and indexing of specific clinical events in large patient textual datasets of symptoms, side effects, and comorbidities from electronic health records, event reports, and reports from specific diagnostic tests. [24] One online text mining application in the biomedical literature is PubGene, a publicly accessible search engine that combines biomedical text mining with network visualization. [25] [26] GoPubMed is a knowledge-based search engine for biomedical texts. Text mining techniques also enable us to extract unknown knowledge from unstructured documents in the clinical domain [27]
Text mining methods and software is also being researched and developed by major firms, including IBM and Microsoft, to further automate the mining and analysis processes, and by different firms working in the area of search and indexing in general as a way to improve their results. Within the public sector, much effort has been concentrated on creating software for tracking and monitoring terrorist activities. [28] For study purposes, Weka software is one of the most popular options in the scientific world, acting as an excellent entry point for beginners. For Python programmers, there is an excellent toolkit called NLTK for more general purposes. For more advanced programmers, there's also the Gensim library, which focuses on word embedding-based text representations.
Text mining is being used by large media companies, such as the Tribune Company, to clarify information and to provide readers with greater search experiences, which in turn increases site "stickiness" and revenue. Additionally, on the back end, editors are benefiting by being able to share, associate and package news across properties, significantly increasing opportunities to monetize content.
Text analytics is being used in business, particularly, in marketing, such as in customer relationship management. [29] Coussement and Van den Poel (2008) [30] [31] apply it to improve predictive analytics models for customer churn (customer attrition). [30] Text mining is also being applied in stock returns prediction. [32]
Sentiment analysis may involve analysis of products such as movies, books, or hotel reviews for estimating how favorable a review is for the product. [33] Such an analysis may need a labeled data set or labeling of the affectivity of words. Resources for affectivity of words and concepts have been made for WordNet [34] and ConceptNet, [35] respectively.
Text has been used to detect emotions in the related area of affective computing. [36] Text based approaches to affective computing have been used on multiple corpora such as students evaluations, children stories and news stories.
The issue of text mining is of importance to publishers who hold large databases of information needing indexing for retrieval. This is especially true in scientific disciplines, in which highly specific information is often contained within the written text. Therefore, initiatives have been taken such as Nature's proposal for an Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) and the National Institutes of Health's common Journal Publishing Document Type Definition (DTD) that would provide semantic cues to machines to answer specific queries contained within the text without removing publisher barriers to public access.
Academic institutions have also become involved in the text mining initiative:
Computational methods have been developed to assist with information retrieval from scientific literature. Published approaches include methods for searching, [40] determining novelty, [41] and clarifying homonyms [42] among technical reports.
The automatic analysis of vast textual corpora has created the possibility for scholars to analyze millions of documents in multiple languages with very limited manual intervention. Key enabling technologies have been parsing, machine translation, topic categorization, and machine learning.
The automatic parsing of textual corpora has enabled the extraction of actors and their relational networks on a vast scale, turning textual data into network data. The resulting networks, which can contain thousands of nodes, are then analyzed by using tools from network theory to identify the key actors, the key communities or parties, and general properties such as robustness or structural stability of the overall network, or centrality of certain nodes. [44] This automates the approach introduced by quantitative narrative analysis, [45] whereby subject-verb-object triplets are identified with pairs of actors linked by an action, or pairs formed by actor-object. [43]
Content analysis has been a traditional part of social sciences and media studies for a long time. The automation of content analysis has allowed a "big data" revolution to take place in that field, with studies in social media and newspaper content that include millions of news items. Gender bias, readability, content similarity, reader preferences, and even mood have been analyzed based on text mining methods over millions of documents. [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] The analysis of readability, gender bias and topic bias was demonstrated in Flaounas et al. [51] showing how different topics have different gender biases and levels of readability; the possibility to detect mood patterns in a vast population by analyzing Twitter content was demonstrated as well. [52] [53]
Text mining computer programs are available from many commercial and open source companies and sources.
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Under European copyright and database laws, the mining of in-copyright works (such as by web mining) without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal. In the UK in 2014, on the recommendation of the Hargreaves review, the government amended copyright law [54] to allow text mining as a limitation and exception. It was the second country in the world to do so, following Japan, which introduced a mining-specific exception in 2009. However, owing to the restriction of the Information Society Directive (2001), the UK exception only allows content mining for non-commercial purposes. UK copyright law does not allow this provision to be overridden by contractual terms and conditions.
The European Commission facilitated stakeholder discussion on text and data mining in 2013, under the title of Licenses for Europe. [55] The fact that the focus on the solution to this legal issue was licenses, and not limitations and exceptions to copyright law, led representatives of universities, researchers, libraries, civil society groups and open access publishers to leave the stakeholder dialogue in May 2013. [56]
US copyright law, and in particular its fair use provisions, means that text mining in America, as well as other fair use countries such as Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, is viewed as being legal. As text mining is transformative, meaning that it does not supplant the original work, it is viewed as being lawful under fair use. For example, as part of the Google Book settlement the presiding judge on the case ruled that Google's digitization project of in-copyright books was lawful, in part because of the transformative uses that the digitization project displayed—one such use being text and data mining. [57]
There is no exception in copyright law of Australia for text or data mining within the Copyright Act 1968 . The Australian Law Reform Commission has noted that it is unlikely that the "research and study" fair dealing exception would extend to cover such a topic either, given it would be beyond the "reasonable portion" requirement. [58]
Until recently, websites most often used text-based searches, which only found documents containing specific user-defined words or phrases. Now, through use of a semantic web, text mining can find content based on meaning and context (rather than just by a specific word). Additionally, text mining software can be used to build large dossiers of information about specific people and events. For example, large datasets based on data extracted from news reports can be built to facilitate social networks analysis or counter-intelligence. In effect, the text mining software may act in a capacity similar to an intelligence analyst or research librarian, albeit with a more limited scope of analysis. Text mining is also used in some email spam filters as a way of determining the characteristics of messages that are likely to be advertisements or other unwanted material. Text mining plays an important role in determining financial market sentiment.
Bioinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, computer programming, information engineering, mathematics and statistics to analyze and interpret biological data. The subsequent process of analyzing and interpreting data is often referred to as computational biology, though the distinction between the two terms is often disputed.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
Data mining is the process of extracting and discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and statistics with an overall goal of extracting information from a data set and transforming the information into a comprehensible structure for further use. Data mining is the analysis step of the "knowledge discovery in databases" process, or KDD. Aside from the raw analysis step, it also involves database and data management aspects, data pre-processing, model and inference considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity considerations, post-processing of discovered structures, visualization, and online updating.
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. Typically, this involves processing human language texts by means of natural language processing (NLP). Recent activities in multimedia document processing like automatic annotation and content extraction out of images/audio/video/documents could be seen as information extraction.
Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of data computationally, to create a subset that represents the most important or relevant information within the original content. Artificial intelligence algorithms are commonly developed and employed to achieve this, specialized for different types of data.
Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.
Semantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity. These are mathematical tools used to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between units of language, concepts or instances, through a numerical description obtained according to the comparison of information supporting their meaning or describing their nature. The term semantic similarity is often confused with semantic relatedness. Semantic relatedness includes any relation between two terms, while semantic similarity only includes "is a" relations. For example, "car" is similar to "bus", but is also related to "road" and "driving".
Unstructured data is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. This results in irregularities and ambiguities that make it difficult to understand using traditional programs as compared to data stored in fielded form in databases or annotated in documents.
Biomedical text mining refers to the methods and study of how text mining may be applied to texts and literature of the biomedical domain. As a field of research, biomedical text mining incorporates ideas from natural language processing, bioinformatics, medical informatics and computational linguistics. The strategies in this field have been applied to the biomedical literature available through services such as PubMed.
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the analysis of their application. DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing. It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.
Sentiment analysis is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to voice of the customer materials such as reviews and survey responses, online and social media, and healthcare materials for applications that range from marketing to customer service to clinical medicine. With the rise of deep language models, such as RoBERTa, also more difficult data domains can be analyzed, e.g., news texts where authors typically express their opinion/sentiment less explicitly.
The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is a publicly funded text mining (TM) centre. It was established to provide support, advice and information on TM technologies and to disseminate information within the larger TM community, while also providing services and tools in response to the requirements of the United Kingdom academic community.
Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.
Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:
In natural language processing, Entity Linking, also referred to as named-entity disambiguation (NED), named-entity recognition and disambiguation (NERD) or named-entity normalization (NEN) is the task of assigning a unique identity to entities mentioned in text. For example, given the sentence "Paris is the capital of France", the main idea is to first identify "Paris" and "France" as named entities, and then to determine that "Paris" refers to the city of Paris and not to Paris Hilton or any other entity that could be referred to as "Paris" and "France" to the french country. The Entity Linking task is composed of 3 subtasks. First, Named Entity Recognition, which consist in the extraction of named entities from a text. Second, for each named entity, the objective is to generate candidates from a Knowledge Base. We call this step candidate generation. The main challenge being that we want to get the corresponding entity inside the candidates set. Lastly, the objective is to choose from the candidate set the correct entity. We call this step disambiguation.
NetOwl is a suite of multilingual text and identity analytics products that analyze big data in the form of text data – reports, web, social media, etc. – as well as structured entity data about people, organizations, places, and things.
Computational social science is an interdisciplinary academic sub-field concerned with computational approaches to the social sciences. This means that computers are used to model, simulate, and analyze social phenomena. It has been applied in areas such as computational economics, computational sociology, computational media analysis, cliodynamics, culturomics, nonprofit studies. It focuses on investigating social and behavioral relationships and interactions using data science approaches, network analysis, social simulation and studies using interactive systems.
Amir Hussain is a cognitive scientist, the director of Cognitive Big Data and Cybersecurity (CogBID) Research Lab at Edinburgh Napier University He is a professor of computing science. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature's internationally leading Cognitive Computation journal and the new Big Data Analytics journal. He is founding Editor-in-Chief for two Springer Book Series: Socio-Affective Computing and Cognitive Computation Trends, and also serves on the Editorial Board of a number of other world-leading journals including, as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Systems) and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine.