Research information tool: intelligent text mining

Embryonic development of a distributed supercompter serving public research.

The Guardian — Digging for data that can change our world

The government's response has been to set up the National Centre for Text Mining, the world's first centre devoted to developing tools that can systematically analyse multiple research papers, abstracts and other documents, and then swiftly determine what they contain.

Text mining uses artificial intelligence techniques to look in texts for entities (a quality or characteristic, such as a date or job title) and concepts (the relationship between two genes, for example). In many ways, it's more precise and sophisticated than a search engine: it not only tracks down information against specified criteria but can also draw out relationships between hitherto unlinked bits of research (see below).