The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.
“We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier,” said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. “To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians.”
Text mining allows a computer to extract useful information from unstructured text. Until recently, text mining required a great deal of preparation before documents could be analyzed in a meaningful way.” (ScienceDaily)
