Text analysis and knowledge mining system

Large text databases potentially contain a great wealth of knowledge. However, text represents factual information (and information about the author’s communicative intentions) in a complex, rich, and opaque manner. Consequently, unlike numerical and fixed field data, it cannot be analyzed by standard statistical data mining methods. Relying on human analysis results in either huge workloads or the analysis of only a tiny fraction of the database. We are working on text mining technology to extract knowledge from very large amounts of textual data. Unlike information retrieval technology that allows a user to select documents that meet the user’s requirements and interests, or document clustering technology that organizes documents, we focus on finding valuable patterns and rules in text that indicate trends and significant features about specific topics. By applying our prototype system named TAKMI (Text Analysis and Knowledge MIning) to textual databases in PC help centers, we can automatically detect product failures; determine issues that have led to rapid increases in the number of calls and their underlying reasons; and analyze help center productivity and changes in customers’ behavior involving a particular product, without reading any of the text. We have verified that our framework is also effective for other data such as patent documents.