The Text Mining Handbook: Advanced Approaches in Analyzing Unstructured Data

This was one of the few books that included a very clear and extensive treatment of information extraction techniques. There were plenty of diagrams which is great for a visual learner. All the techniques are explained using both plain English and formulas, so that you can pick up the scientific notation with minimal previous knowledge.

Even when the authors plug their own company and research at the end it was moderately useful in illustrating the concepts mentioned in a real world scenario.

The amount of textual information floating around on the web is staggering. And the overwhelming amount of this information is simply passed along from sender to receiver for the human being reading it to make sense out of it. There are obvious demands to use a computer to 'read' this material and select out appropriate nuggets from the ore.

Intended for use by advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, researchers and people working in the field, this book first covers the definition of the problem and presents several state-of-the-art probabilistic models for information extraction, and how these models can be used in applications. Finally a rather detailed description of several real life applications are included: patent searching, scanning magazine articles, and scanning the news for business intelligence.

Do you suppose that somewhere, some body (or maybe a lot of bodies) are using these techniques to find words like bomb, explosion, etc.