Chapter 10 Self-organization of very large document collections

Text mining systems are developed to aid the users in satisfying their information needs, which may vary from searching answers to well-specified questions to learning more of a scientific discipline. The major tasks of web mining are searching, browsing, and visualization. Searching is best suited for answering specific questions of a well-informed user. Browsing and visualization, on the other hand, are beneficial especially when the information need is more general, or the topic area is new to the user [6]. The SOM, applied to organizing very large document collections, can aid in all the three tasks.