Section: Research Program

Text Mining

Keywords: text mining, knowledge discovery from texts, text classification, annotation, ontology engineering from texts.

The objective of a text mining process is to extract useful knowledge units from large collections of texts [71]. 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 text mining a difficult task. 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 knowledge discovery perspective, text mining aims at extracting “interesting units” (nouns and relations) from texts with the help of domain knowledge encoded within a knowledge base. The process is roughly similar for text annotation. Text mining is especially useful in the context of semantic web for ontology engineering. In the Orpailleur team, we work on the mining of real-world texts in application domains such as biology and medicine, using numerical and 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”.