Text Mining to Facilitate Domain Knowledge Discovery

The high-precision observation and measurement techniques have accelerated the rapid development of geoscience research in the past decades and have pro-duced large amounts of research outputs. Many findings and discoveries were recorded in the geological literature, which is regarded as unstructured data. For these data, traditional research methods have limited functions for integrating and mining them to make knowledge discovery. Text mining based on natural language processing (NLP) provides the necessary method and technology to analyze unstructured geological literature. In this book chapter, we will review the latest researches of text mining in the domain of geoscience and present results from a few case studies. The research includes three major parts: (1) structuralization of geological literature, (2) information extraction and visualization for geological literature, and (3) geological text mining to assist database construction and knowledge discovery.