Untangling text data mining

The possibilities for data mining from large text collections are virtually untapped. Text expresses a vast, rich range of information, but encodes this information in a form that is difficult to decipher automatically. Perhaps for this reason, there has been little work in text data mining to date, and most people who have talked about it have either conflated it with information access or have not made use of text directly to discover heretofore unknown information.