TABLE OF CONTENTS The explosion in the amount of data generated from government and corporate databases, e-mails, Internet survey forms, phone and cellular records, and other communications has led to the use of several data mining technologies, including the need to extract concepts and keywords from unstructured data via text mining tools using unique clustering techniques. Patterns in digital textual files provide clues to the identity and features of criminals, which forensic investigators and intelligence analysts can uncover via the use of a special genre of text mining tools.
Based on a field of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), text mining tools can capture critical features of a document's content based on the analysis of its linguistic characteristics. NLP attempts to analyze, understand, and generate languages that humans use naturally. This goal is not easy to reach. Understanding language means, among other things, knowing what concept a word or phrase stands for and how to link those concepts together in a meaningful way. It's ironic that natural language, the symbol system that is easiest for humans to learn and use, is hardest for a computer to master.
NLP development may take place in attempting to understand the optimal ways in which natural language can be incorporated into multimedia interfaces, such as software agents, or in integrating linguistic processing with speech recognition, both to make speech recognition more accurate and to use the results of speech recognition in practical applications. Much of the work of NLP focuses...
