What Is SAS Text Miner 12.1?

SAS Text Miner is a plug-in for the SAS Enterprise Miner environment. SAS Enterprise Miner provides a rich set of data mining tools that facilitate the prediction aspect of text mining. The integration of SAS Text Miner within SAS Enterprise Miner combines textual data with traditional data mining variables. Text mining nodes can be embedded into a SAS Enterprise Miner process flow diagram. SAS Text Miner supports various sources of textual data: local text files, text as observations in SAS data sets or external databases, and files on the Web.

SAS Text Miner 12.1 includes the following nodes that you can use in your text mining analysis:

For more information about the SAS Text Miner nodes, see the corresponding chapter in this book, or the SAS Text Miner Help.

Together, the Text Miner nodes encompass the parsing and exploration aspects of text mining and the preparation of data for predictive mining and further exploration when you use other SAS Enterprise Miner nodes. You can analyze structured text information, and combine the structured output of the Text Miner nodes with other structured data as desired. The Text Miner nodes are highly customizable and enable you to choose among a variety of options. For example, the Text Parsing node enables you to parse documents for detailed information about the terms, phrases, and other entities in the collection. The Text Cluster node enables you to cluster documents into meaningful groups and to report concepts that you discover in the clusters. Sorting, searching, filtering (subsetting), and finding similar terms or documents all enhance the exploration process.

SAS Text Miner also enables you to use a SAS macro that is called %TMFILTER. This macro accomplishes a text preprocessing step and enables SAS data sets to be created from documents that reside in your file system or on Web pages. These documents can exist in a number of proprietary formats.

SAS Text Miner is a flexible tool that can solve a variety of problems. Here are some examples of tasks that can be accomplished using SAS Text Miner: