Text Mining in the Context of Business Intelligence

Abstract

Information about the external environment and organizational processes are among the most worthwhile input for business intelligence (BI). Nowadays, companies have plenty of information in structured or textual forms, either from external monitoring or from the corporative systems. In the last years, the structured part of this information stock has been massively explored by means of data-mining (DM) techniques (Wang, 2003), generating models that enable the analysts to gain insights on the solutions for organizational problems. On the text-mining (TM) side, the rhythm of new applications development did not go so fast. In an informal poll carried out in 2002 (Kdnuggets), just 4% of the knowledge-discovery-from-databases (KDD) practitioners were applying TM techniques. This fact is as intriguing as surprising if one considers that 80% of all information available in an organization comes in textual form (Tan, 1999).