Summary

Text mining is an interdisciplinary field which involves modelling unstructured data to extract information and knowledge, leveraging numerous statistical, machine learning, and computational linguistic techniques. The text analysis process involves multiple steps, which we will describe in upcoming chapters with practical examples using R. Any data analysis process starts with a preliminary step that comprises data preprocessing and cleansing, and exploratory analysis of the data. In this chapter, we focused on familiarizing you with the important NLP terminologies that will be frequently used throughout this book; this chapter can also act as a quick reference to the NLP packages in R and their widespread utility in different text-mining tasks. The next chapter deals with basic to advanced-level text-processing techniques to empower you with tools and techniques to process unstructured data efficiently.