Customer Reviews

Text Mining Application Programming (Programming Series)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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...

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.

The book claims to "show step-by-step implementations of text mining solutions, and provides complete solutions for users to experiment with".
It is NOT. The CD ROM provided with the book would not install out of the box. Installation is painstaking and requires actual debugging of Perl and looking into Apache log for error messages. For example, access to the main page requires password and user name which are not mentioned anywhere in the book (for theose who wont to know the user is "fmuser" and password "fmpass"). CGI scripts will attempt to access directories it does not have access to. It will try to create files on the drive it was installed from (i.e. CD) and all kind of nonsense like that. After you go through all this hurdle you will find that even though there are CD signs beside some articles, there is no information which links the article with actual implementation.
It very much looks like the book was written by someone who haven't done any programming in years and software was written by a bunch of first year college students, who did not even care to install the whole package once to see how it works.
I would not recommend it for those who want to familiarize themselves with relatively new area of Text Mining and try to build a simple sample using provided libraries.

Software developers learn how to mine information on the Web and turn it into valuable data; but developers need to understand how data mining works. For a programmer's application-oriented review, Text Mining Application Programming is the item of choice: it reviews text data, how it's found, and how search engines locate and gather it. Next, it teaches how to build spiders to crawl the Web, how to use the information, and how to monitoring it. Perl developers will find its Perl-based code useful, but it's not necessary to know Perl to run the software herein. An excellent guide to mining the Net.

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1) all pseudo-code examples (in fact it is the general mindset of the algorithms) assumes that texts are handled as streams of characters. I would rather go for a corpora-based approach
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2) since I primarily code in Java|ANSII C|C++ I wasn't really interested about the software included in the CD-ROM, until I read a few things that made me look for it, to find that:
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2.1) CD-ROM had been ripped from book cover (I am not sure who did this ...)
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2.2) charlesrivermedia.com is not the company that published the book
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2.3) charlesriver.com doesn't exist anymore
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2.4) I could not contact the author himself
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Can anyone lend me a hand on this?
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Thank you

There is an old expression that half of knowing anything is knowing where to find it. And there is little more frustrating to be looking at 'My Computer' trying to find what you know you have stored in a file somewhere. Well, perhaps just as frustrating is to go to one of the search engines and try to find something that you know is there but just don't know the proper words to find it.

In this book Dr. Konchady talks about how to go find data that is in text form on your system, on your network or out on the web somewhere. It talks about search engines, but also about other techniques that can be used only by programming.

The CD that comes with the book contains several Perl software snippets that help to find named entities, parts of speech, phrases and gives a summary of text documents. This area includes developing web crawlers that can be adapted by individual users to go out and find specialized information. It further contains an Open Source software package called Text Mine that is designed for mining operations. In addition it has utilities to build and enhance Text Mine and utilities to build and manage MySQL database tables. This is an excellent book on everything from the basic hints and types through some of the mathematics that underlies text mining.

His section on the nature of an English language Question and Answer system is the best I've ever seen.