I have made effort here to explain about the steps and methods of Text Mining in Laymen's terms.

1. Text Mining for Insights
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Karthik Padmanabhan, Manager, Ford Motor Pvt Ltd

2. Planning and Prioritization
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Objective -
Wide variety of use cases available and is expanding by the day. Need to clearly state the end objective
and how it is useful to the business.
Data Sources –
 The sources can range from call center to sales, service, quality reporting system etc.,
 You can also scrape data from social media sites.
Text Mining Tool -
Which Software to Use? SAS or R or Python. Why choosing the right one is critical? What factors
affect the decision making process? – Cost, Reliability and Consistency of results, Ease of Use, Data
Storage Model and Capacity, Learning Curve, Features Coverage, Performance etc.,
Why is Text Mining Hard to do? – Beware, You are dealing with high dimensional data which is
resource hungry.
What makes it special from Analytics PoV? – Human beings are good in expressing their
feelings or emotions in words than numbers. Even Machine logs have more keywords and texts.
Approach to Text Mining – This varies from one firm to another. Not 2 data scientist's are the
same anyway. This depends on the context, skill or toolset of the data scientist, type of data available
and other factors. No approach is the best approach.

3. Goal Realization
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Data Loading
Is it going to be a smooth ride? God only Knows…Big Headache.
Data Cleansing
Treatment of outliers and formatting. What are outliers in a textual context?... Bigger
Headache.
Data Preprocessing
What it is and how it is different from cleansing? The real magic happens at this stage for the
project along with creating Biggest Headache for you.  Take a Break and have some coffee.
Data Visualization
Why Visualization of Text is harder than you think?
Which is the right chart/graph to use?
Finally…The Real Aha Moment.
Insights
The perfect combination of art and craft in getting the required inferences lies here.
Validation
It’s a world without R square and P Values. Oh… how to validate the model then?

4. Sample Visuals
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Handmade by a Russian cosmonaut, Georgi Grechko, this cyclogram shows a 96-day flight of Salyut 6. Some 22 parallel time-series show
1500 sunrises and 1500 sunsets during the flight, a schedule for space walks and baths, and visits of resupply ships bringing equipment,
fresh fruit, and gingerbread. Printed in six colors on fine paper, 36” by 20”.
Word Cloud Link Graph
Source - http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters

5. Thank You
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