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Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't text mining just another way of searching the web?

We should make clear that text mining is not the same as searching. Search, or informational retrieval, is only the first step in text mining. Once an information retrieval system has been used to identify the documents that are relevant to a particular problem, these documents then need to be analysed by additional systems which use a mixture of natural language processing and data mining techniques to extract information and identify patterns in that information, leading to the discovery of new knowledge. The aim is not to improve the results of searching, but rather to help users find information which previously may only have been discoverable by reading large numbers of documents, or which was not in practice discoverable at all.