Text mining and its applications

The world of text mining is simultaneously a minefield and a gold mine. It is an exciting application field and an area of scientific research that is currently under rapid development. It uses techniques from well-established scientific fields (e. g. data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, natural language processing, case based reasoning, statistics and knowledge management) in an effort to help people gain insight, understand and interpret large quantities of (usually) semi-structured and unstructured data. Despite the advances made during the last few years, many issues remain umesolved. Proper co-ordination activities, dissemination of current trends and standardisation of the procedures have been identified, as key needs. There are many questions still unanswered, especially to the potential users; what is the scope of Text Mining, who uses it and for what purpose, what constitutes the leading trends in the field of Text Mining -especially in relation to IT- and whether there still remain areas to be covered.