506 Big Data Computing
irrespective of grammatical forms). This level of analysis is the word level;
it is mostly irrelevant to knowledge processing, but it is extensively used in
applications such as automatic speech recognition.
Analogous to object recognition is the recognition of a named entity (a
company, a person). Named entities may have different names (e.g., IBM,
International Business Machines), circumscriptions (the biggest IT services
company), etc.
Theme or scene recognition is performed in textual information processing
by identifying topics a text is relevant to. This can be learnt in an unsuper-
vised way (e.g., to identify major themes in the texts of an online discus-
sion forum) or in a supervised way (by traini