Text Mining – What Is it?

Each day we take in a ton of text. It could be through emails, advertisements on a billboard, text messages, or even a book. There is text everywhere. What you’ll notice is that your brain can’t hold all of the text that you see over a day and analyze it because it’s too much.

Enter in text mining. Text mining helps businesses capture large amounts of text from the internet and applications to be analyzed using text analysis software. This type of software is part of advanced analytics, which is used in many tech companies today.

After text mining is complete by pulling the textual data, natural language processing takes over to analyze the data within the text. From here, data visualization takes place to give us as humans a broader understanding of what trends and patterns are happening within the text. Now, we can use this information to make better decisions within our business.

A great example of using text mining in business decisions, is with analyzing customer satisfaction surveys. If you are a company that receives a large amount of these, you would use text mining to pull the data and give you the trends. This makes it very easy to make better decisions on behalf of your customer without spending a ton of time reading over every single survey individually.

Text mining sounds simple, but it can be a little bit more complicated than we think. To start the process an information retrieval is done, which is just gathering all of the text from all of the sources. The harder part is getting all of the text structured so that it can be analyzed. This is because a lot of the data that is gathered is unstructured meaning it’s written by humans. Human written text is not written in a way that computers or technology can understand easily because we use slang and other informalities. The software will then break down the text to identify nouns and verbs etc. It will even go as far as using statistical techniques to identify and label named features such as people, locations, businesses and other well-known words. The system also needs to spend time picking up on ambiguous words and deciphering the appropriate meaning, along-side determining all of the expressions said within the text.  Finally, the software will do a sentiment analysis which can determine if the text is positive, negative or neutral. This of course is used mostly with survey analysis like the example given above.

Overall, text mining is a great way to analyze large amounts of data in a small amount of time. It gives us the information we need to help make better decisions for our businesses. There are several software applications that do this and it’s an emerging business.

Text mining is not machine translation, nor is it used effectively in translation memories, yet.

However, text mining is the very basic concept of data mining and cryptocurrency – but that is another blog!