Natural Language Processing and Text Mining

Text mining is the discovery and extraction of interesting, non-trivial knowledge from free or unstructured text. This encompasses everything from information retrieval (i.e., document or web site retrieval) to text classification and clustering, to (somewhat more recently) entity, relation, and event extraction. Natural language processing (NLP), is the attempt to extract a fuller meaning representation from free text. This can be put roughly as figuring out who did what to whom, when, where, how and why.