AI Lexicon — T

Text mining

Text mining is a method of organizing — or structuring — large sets of unstructured data so that it can be read, analyzed and understood by machines and humans.

It's said that 80% of the world's data is unstructured — it lies hidden in bundles of text, in social media posts, videos, audio, emails, or scientific studies, for instance. And it's unstructured because it's written in prose or presented in images.

Structured data, on the other hand, is data that has been categorized and compiled into a list or a table, such as a spreadsheet. A simple example of structured data is a contacts list, where each entry consists of a number of columns: first name, second name, telephone number, address.

Once data is structured, it can be analyzed and mined for new information and insights, such as connections between the people on that contacts list. AI is used to automate and speed up such processes. (za, fs)

 

Coming soon:

Turing, Alan
The "but China" Argument

Sources:

Text mining (Springer) https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_418 (accessed October 17, 2023)

What is unstructured data? (Coursera) https://www.coursera.org/articles/what-is-unstructured-data (accessed October 17, 2023)

What is text mining? (IBM) https://www.ibm.com/topics/text-mining (accessed October 17, 2023)

Read the rest of DW's AI Lexicon:

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

We're keen to hear your feedback. Suggest an entry by sending us a comment. And let us know if you feel we have missed something, got it wrong, and tell us whether our AI Lexicon has helped you understand the technology better.

Written and edited by: Zulfikar Abbany (za), Fred Schwaller (fs)