Text Mining

text mining (text analytics) - Text mining is the analysis of data contained in natural language text. The application of text mining techniques to solve business problems is called text analytics.

Text mining can help an organization derive potentially valuable business insights from text-based content such as word documents, email and postings on social media streams like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Mining unstructured data with natural language processing (NLP), statistical modeling and machine learning techniques can be challenging, however, because natural language text is often inconsistent. It contains ambiguities caused by inconsistent syntax and semantics, including slang, language specific to vertical industries and age groups, double entendres and sarcasm.

Text analytics software can help by transposing words and phrases in unstructured data into numerical values which can then be linked with structured data in a database and analyzed with traditional data mining techniques. With an iterative approach, an organization can successfully use text analytics to gain insight into content-specific values such as sentiment, emotion, intensity and relevance. Because text analytics technology is still considered to be an emerging technology, however, results and depth of analysis can vary wildly from vendor to vendor.

See also: electronic discovery / e-discovery, predictive coding

Related glossary terms: law of large numbers, big data analytics, data science, data-driven disaster, ad hoc analysis, noisy text, unstructured data, Plutchik's wheel of emotions, document capture, named entity

[Category=Data Management ]

Source: WhatIs.com, 12 September 2013 09:19:18, http://whatis.techtarget.com/glossary/Data-and-Data-Management