Section: Scientific Foundations

Elements on Text Mining

The objective of a text mining process is to extract new and useful knowledge units in a large set of texts [77] , [88] . The text mining process shows specific characteristics due to the fact that texts are complex objects written in natural language. The information in a text is expressed in an informal way, following linguistic rules, making the mining process more complex. To avoid information dispersion, a text mining process has to take into account –as much as possible– paraphrases, ambiguities, specialized vocabulary, and terminology. This is why the preparation of texts for text mining is usually dependent on linguistic resources and methods.

From a KDDK perspective, the text mining process is aimed at extracting new knowledge units from texts with the help of background knowledge encoded within an ontology and which is useful to relate notions present in a text, to guide and to help the text mining process. Text mining is especially useful in the context of semantic web for ontology engineering [85] , [84] , [83] . In the Orpailleur team, the focus is put on real-world texts in application domains such as astronomy, biology and medicine, using mainly symbolic data mining methods. Accordingly, the text mining process may be involved in a loop used to enrich and to extend linguistic resources. In turn, linguistic and ontological resources can be exploited to guide a “knowledge-based text mining process”.