Information Retrieval and Text Mining

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This course will provide an in-depth overview of the broad fields of Information Retrieval and Text Mining. Information retrieval is about finding material (such as documents) of an unstructured nature that satisfies an information need from within large collections. Information retrieval is about words, phrases, search terms and natural language with operators and qualifiers. Text mining refers generally to the process of extracting interesting and non-trivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text mining encompasses several computer science disciplines with a strong orientation towards artificial intelligence in general, including pattern recognition, neural networks, natural language processing, information retrieval and machine learning. An important difference with standard information retrieval techniques is that they require a user to know what he or she is looking for, while text mining attempts to discover information in a pattern that is not known beforehand. This is very relevant, for example, in criminal investigations, legal discovery, (business) intelligence, clinical research or and due diligence investigations. After completing this course the student will be able to adequately apply information retrieval and text-mining techniques to relevant problems.