| All around modern society, an enormous amount of strategic information is spread in many different presentation forms, like e-mail, formal and informal documents, historical reports, personal notes, Web pages, and so on. The access and transformation of this information in knowledge as a basis for decision making in the corporate world have become crucial in the face of global competitiveness. Since the mid-1990s, much research has been devoted to creating techniques, methods, and tools to support organizations in discovering useful knowledge from those sources. An important challenge has been brought into the scene for the next 10 years: how can we prepare a real David’s Army in order to take advantage from this exponentially generated information in favor of a society with more wisdom, justice, and equal opportunities for all citizens? For this purpose, it is necessary intelligence and technology.
In this context of information-drowning fields as data, text, and Web mining have developed many solutions by extending techniques from artificial intelligence, statistic, data bases, and information retrieval aiming to scale them to the new problems. Also, new techniques to extract knowledge from corporate databases have been proposed crossing those areas. Text mining (TM), in particular, has presented a significant evolution from simple word processing, around 1997, until now, when the adequate processing of concepts or even the extraction of knowledge from linguistic structures has been made possible. In this way, the complexity involved in processing the huge amount of texts available in the organizations can be effectively approached.
Drs. Edilson Ferneda and Hércules Prado, since 2002, have carried out methodological and applied research in data and text mining fields in the context of competitive and organizational intelligence. Particularly, on the TM side, their effort was focused first in covering the gap existing between the technology and its effective application in organizations. Next, they stressed the application of TM in solving problems in governmental research and development (R&D) and strategic management.
The book Emerging Technologies of Text Mining: Techniques and Applications brings some of the most significant research results achieved recently in the TM field, and represents a reference for researchers and practitioners. |
