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WORKSHOP
jects. the problem, however, is the collection of reference texts. As the general
use of a language should be represented, a clear deinition of the borders between
a general and a speciic vocabulary has to be found. But in the daily
world, which is more and more inluenced by new technologies, this deinition
is not evident.
A similar problem exists for the deinition of threshold values. their exactness
has a direct impact on the usefulness of the second one of the abovementioned
word classes. this is of particular importance with respect to the generalisation
of speciic vocabularies in the everyday language, which tends to
minimise the irst class.
to overcome such limits, additional methods have to be implemented.
the probabilistic language model, which is based on syntactical and semantic
analyses, leads to the deinition of rules which limit the number of combinations
of linguistic entities. the example The bone eats a dog, although syntactically
correct, has to be rejected as bone cannot be the acting part in the context
of the verb eat. A similar rule will exclude Birne ‘bulb’ from being the object of
the same verb ( 4 ).
Various other methods will have to be used to reine text-mining analyses.
the cooperation of different scientiic disciplines will be necessary in order to
deine relevant vocabularies.
3. ImPLEmENtAtION Of tEXt mINING
Before text-mining methodologies can eficiently contribute to the acquisition
of knowledge, an enormous amount of preparatory work has to be done.
In particular, dictionaries have to be created which contain suficient information
for the text analysis as well as the necessary interlinking such as described
by ontologies.
this may be one of the reasons why text mining is established for speciic
subject matter. the life science domain is particularly active. It is supposed to have
the largest user community and the fastest-growing literature. the fraunhofer Institut
in Bonn-St Augustin, Germany, organises an annual conference where representatives
from various subjects report on the evolution of their projects.
A project which is at a state of relatively high maturity is Biotem (Deutsches
virtuelles Centrum für text mining in der Biomedizin (the German vir-
( 4 ) Leaving aside some sensational performers who lead their audience to believe that they
are really eating bulbs.
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