Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications

Foreword 3

The field of text mining—the process of finding patterns in unstructured data—has been an active area of research for more than two decades. Of course, even defining text mining is not easy, and as this book so systematically lays out, text mining is defined broadly enough to include everything from basic search to natural language processing (NLP). Unfortunately, the predictive analytics algorithms most analysts use are designed to build models from structured data, not unstructured data. Because it is difficult to convert unstructured data into the more useful structured format, unstructured data are often left unexplored.

Today, with a growing collection of unstructured data, increasing computer power, and enhanced software capabilities, ...