Text Mining Application Programming (Programming Series) [Paperback]

Manu Konchady (Author)

Book Description

Series: Programming Series | Publication Date: May 4, 2006

Text mining offers a way for individuals and corporations to exploit the vast amount of information available on the Internet. Text Mining Application Programming teaches developers about the problems of managing unstructured text, and describes how to build tools for text mining using standard statistical methods from Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. These tools can be used for a variety of fields, including law, business, and medicine. Key topics covered include, information extraction, clustering, text categorization, searching the Web, summarization, and natural language query systems. The book explains the theory behind each topic and algorithm, and then provides a practical solution implementation with which developers and students can experiment. A wide variety of code is also included for developers to build their own custom solutions. After reading through this book developers will be able to tap into the bevy information available online in ways they never thought possible and students will have a thorough understanding of the theory and practical application of text mining.

Product Details

• Paperback: 412 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (May 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584504609
• ISBN-13: 978-1584504603
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #249,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #38 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Databases > Data Mining

More About the Author

Manu Konchady is a developer working with open source text processing tools. He received his PhD in Information Technology from George Mason University and has written several articles and a book about text mining. Earlier, he worked at IBM, NASA, and the Mitre Corporation. He is a Sun certified Java programmer and is a frequent speaker at the Foss.in conferences.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book to bootstrap yourself into Text Mining, May 3, 2008

By 

Sujit Pal "Sujit Pal" (Antioch, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Text Mining Application Programming (Programming Series) (Paperback)

I am a Java web/search programmer who wanted to "get into" text mining. I found this book an excellent resource for this. Text Mining is a field in which active research is still going on, and other Text Mining books I have looked at reflect this - the authors expect you to have a certain degree of mathematical background to understand what they are saying. This book explains briefly the math behind each of the approaches, but it focuses more on the algorithms that result from the math, so it is easier to read.

Of course, a side effect of this is that the approaches described are not necessarily the state of the art for solving any given problem, but once you get the basic approach to solving a problem, it is relatively easy to find and understand the documentation on the web for the more advanced approaches, since you now know what you are looking for and how it differs from your basic solution.

The book does have a (fairly long) chapter where it covers the math background necessary to get started with Text Mining. If you understand the stuff in there, you will actually be able to think up solutions to text mining problems that are unique to your own situation.

The algorithms in the book are in pseudo-code, but the book comes with a CD (or download from the author's sourceforge project textmine.sf.net) where you can see working Perl code.

Overall, I think this is one of the most useful books that I have purchased in a while. It should appeal most to programmer types who have programmed in their language(s) of choice for a while in areas other than text mining, wants to get into text mining, and doesn't want to spend a lot of time relearning high school and college math before starting off.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!, July 4, 2008

By 

J. Carlson (Boston MA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Text Mining Application Programming (Programming Series) (Paperback)

This is a well written book, code is easy to download, and a number of topics. All in all though, the writing is clear and easily understood so it's well worth the money...

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Subject, March 29, 2008

By 

C. Hivert (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Text Mining Application Programming (Programming Series) (Paperback)

Text mining is one of the most exciting subjects of the web, and too few books are dealing with it. This one is one of them, and it gives quite a few examples of text mining applications, like spam filters or search engine ranking algorithms. The style is easy to follow, and the concepts easy to understand given some maths background.

However, I expected more details, and a richer content overall, thus the four stars. This is still a good book.