Discourse Processing for Text Mining
This chapter presents the challenge of integrating knowledge at higher levels of discourse than the sentence, to avoid “missing the forest for the trees”. Characterisation tasks aimed at filtering collections are introduced, showing use of the whole set of layout constituents from sentence to text body. Few text descriptors encapsulating knowledge on text properties are used for each granularity level. Text processing differs according to tasks, whether individual document mining or tagging small or large collections prior to information extraction. Very shallow and domain independent techniques are used to tag collections to save costs on sentence parsing and semantic manual annotation. This approach achieves satisfactory characterisation of text types, for example reviews versus clinical reports, or argumentation-type articles versus explanation-type. These collection filtering techniques are fit for a wider domain of biomedical literature than genomics.