One consequence of the pervasive use of computers is that most documents originate in digital form. Text mining-the process of searching, retrieving, and analyzing unstructured, natural-language text-is concerned with how to exploit the textual data embedded in these documents.

"The growth of the web can be seen as an expanding public digital library collection. Online digital information extends far beyond the web and its publicly available information. Huge amounts of information are private and are of interest to local communities, such as the records of customers of a business. This information is overwhelmingly text and has its record-keeping purpose, but an automated analysis might be desirable to find patterns in the stored records. Analogous to this data mining is text mining, which also finds patterns and trends in information samples but which does so with far less structured--though with greater immediate utility for users--ingredients. This book focuses on the concepts and methods needed to expand horizons beyond structured, numeric data to automated mining of text samples. It introduces the new world of text mining and examines proven methods for various critical text-mining tasks, such as automated document indexing and information retrieval and search. New research areas are explored, such as information extraction and document summarization, that rely on evolving text-mining techniques."

Overview of Text Mining.- From Textual Information to Numerical Vectors.- Using Text for Prediction.- Information Retrieval and Text Mining.- Finding Structure in a Document Collection.- Looking for Information in Documents.- Case Studies.- Emerging Directions.