Text Mining: Finding Nuggets in Mountains of Textual Data

Jochen Dörre, Peter Gerstl, Roland Seiffert

Abstract: Text mining applies the same analytical functions of data mining to the domain of textual information, relying on sophisticated text analysis techniques that distill information from free-text documents. IBM’s Intelligent Miner for Text provides the necessary tools to unlock the business information that is “trapped” in email, insurance claims, news feeds, or other document repositories. It has been successfully applied in analyzing patent portfolios, customer complaint letters, and even competitors’ Web pages. After defining our notion of “text mining”, we focus on the differences between text and data mining and describe in some more detail the unique technologies that are key to successful text mining.