Technology Foundations
Following is a very brief and abstract overview of the technology foundations of our project. Although the differences in human and computer languages are expansive, there have been technological advances which have begun to close the gap. The field of natural language processing has produced technologies that teach computers natural language so that they may analyze, understand, and even generate text. Some of the technologies that have been developed and can be used in the text mining process are information extraction, topic tracking, summarization, categorization, clustering, concept linkage, information visualization, and question answering.
At this point, we are ready to detail our view of the retrieval process. Such a process is interpreted in terms of component subprocesses whose study yields many of the chapters in this book.
To describe the retrieval process, we use a simple and generic software architecture as shown in Figure. First of all, before the retrieval process can even be initiated, it is necessary to define the text database. This is usually done by the manager of the database, which specifies the following: (a) the documents to be used, (b) the operations to be performed on the text, and (c) the text model (i.e., the text structure and what elements can be retrieved). The text operations transform the original documents and generate a logical view of them.
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