Structural Text Mining

Abstract

The advent of the World Wide Web has resulted in the creation of millions of documents containing unstructured, structured and semi-structured data. Consequently, research on structural text mining has come to the forefront of both information retrieval and natural language processing (Cardie, 1997; Freitag, 1998; Hammer, Garcia-Molina, Cho, Aranha, & Crespo, 1997; Hearst, 1992; Hsu & Chang, 1999; Jacquemin & Bush, 2000; Kushmerick, Weld, & Doorenbos, 1997). Knowledge of how information is organized and structured in texts can be of significant assistance to information systems that use documents as their knowledge bases (Appelt, 1999). In particular, such knowledge is of use to information retrieval systems (Salton & McGill, 1983) that retrieve documents in response to user queries and to systems that use texts to construct domain-specific ontologies or thesauri (Ruge, 1997).