New mine of info

A national centre for text mining, which will allow academics to extract facts and insights from the burgeoning volume of journal articles, is to be set up in the UK. The £1 million initiative, backed by the Joint Information Systems Committee and two research councils, will have its home at the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. The centre will initially focus on biological and biomedical science. It will use techniques from natural language processing, data mining and information retrieval to select relevant textual sources for a particular inquiry, extract key facts and then combine them to produce answers.