Domenica Fioredistella Iezzi - Text Analytics: Advances and Challenges

More information about this series at Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge http://www.springer.com/series/1564

Organization is a book series which offers constant and up-to-date information on the most recent developments and methods in the fields of statistical data analysis, exploratory statistics, classification and clustering, handling of information and ordering of knowledge. It covers a broad scope of theoretical, methodological as well as application-oriented articles, surveys and discussions from an international authorship and includes fields like computational statistics, pattern recognition, biological taxonomy, DNA and genome analysis, marketing, finance and other areas in economics, databases and the internet. A major purpose is to show the intimate interplay between various, seemingly unrelated domains and to foster the cooperation between mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists and practitioners by offering well-based and innovative solutions to urgent problems of practice.

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The Statistical Analysis of Textual Data is a broad field of research that has been developed since the 1950s. The subjects that significantly contributed to its development are Linguistics, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science. Over time, the methodologies have been refined, and the applications have been enriched with new proposals from the segmentation of texts, to the development of linguistic resources, the creation of lexicons, concordance analysis, text classification, sentiment analysis. The fields of application are the most varied, ranging from Psychology to Sociology, Marketing, Economics, Medicine, and Politics. Noteworthy, the Internet has become an inexhaustible source of data, also providing through social media a cross section of the changing society. Big data is the word that most echoes among the data scientists.

This volume aims to collect methodological and applicative contributions to text analysis, previously discussed during the JADT18 conference which took place in Rome from 12 to 15 June 2018. This biennial conference, which has continuously gained importance since its first occurrence in Barcelona (1990), is open to all scholars and researchers working in the field of textual data analysis; ranging from lexicography to the analysis of political discourse, from information retrieval to marketing research, from computational linguistics to sociolinguistics, from text mining to content analysis. After the success of the previous meetings, the three-day conference in Rome continued providing a workshop-style forum through technical paper sessions, invited talks, and panel discussions.

This book, composed of 23 papers, is divided into four macro-parts: (1) techniques, methods, and models parts, (2) dictionaries and specific languages, (3) multilingual text analysis, and (4) applications.

As Umberto Eco said in The Name of the Rose (1980) The beauty of the cosmos is given not only by unity in variety but also by variety in unity. This latter claim outlines the traits of the present book, a variety in unity of analysis, techniques, and methods for the interpretation of the textual phenomenon in a variety of applications to several domains.

Those papers represent a virtual showcase of the wealth of this research field, a classical music concert where each instrument has its role and is indispensable for the general harmony.

The first part (Techniques, Methods and Models) is composed of six papers.

Iezzi and Celardo traced the timeline of text analytics, illustrating indices and techniques that have had a strong impact on this field of research. They showed the long way from the past to the present demarcating what could be the future scenarios.

Misuraca and Spano explained how to prepare a set of documents for quantitative analyses and compared different approaches widely used to extract information automatically, discussing their advantages and disadvantages.