Strengthening ties in text mining

07 May 2012

The University's National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) have signed a memorandum of understanding to conduct joint research.

NaCTeM, which is part of the School of Computer Science, develops software tools that locate and structure important information contained within texts.

Instead of searching for keywords, text mining tools analyse the structure and meaning of text, and can penetrate variants of wording to identify specific types of facts. Their use allows more efficient searching across collections of documents and brings back more coherently structured results.

The information searched by text mining tools can relate to almost any topic: a major focus of NaCTeM's work is on the processing of biomedical text.

The memorandum, signed on 18 April 2012, will strengthen the ties between KISTI and NaCTeM in leading research on the development of core search technology for metabolic pathways (series of chemical reactions occurring within a cell) by using and building upon NaCTeM's existing text mining tools and services.

This technology will help to produce better results from searches of information about pathways and allow the development of tools to simplify the process of curating and updating them.