Mining in the Phrasal Frontier

Data mining, or knowledge discovery, has recently become a popular research area. Data mining methods have been applied to a wide variety of domains, from supermarket basket data and telecommunication alarm data to the analysis of satellite pictures and human genomes. Surprisingly enough, only a few examples of data mining in text are available. However, considering the amount of existing document collections, text mining would be most useful. Traditionally, texts have been analysed using various information retrieval related methods, such as full-text analysis, and natural language processing. In this paper, we present our rst experiments in applying general methods of data mining to discovering phrases and co-occurring terms. We also describe the text mining process developed. Our results show that data mining methods | with appropriate preprocessing | can be used in text processing, and that by shifting the focus the process can be used to obtain results for various purposes.