9. Specific data

9.1  Text mining

Textual data in "free" format available on computer media accounts for 70% of digital data, and can be found in the form of reports, letters, publications, manuals and so on. Texts contain information and knowledge that is useful and sometimes critical for management and decision-making in companies.

Text mining aims to define strategies for exploiting free-form text. There are two levels of processing.

The first level covers information retrieval from text databases. These are essentially natural language query tools (e.g., searching for texts containing a particular word). Thanks to the development of natural language processing technologies, it is also possible to formulate more complex queries containing expressions...