The document describes 10 applications of text mining using GATE, a free and open-source text mining tool. The applications include analyzing social media to understand political debates, tracking natural disasters, and analyzing medical texts to help cure cancer. The document promotes GATE's abilities to extract semantic information from text and link it to external knowledge bases to enable intelligent search and analysis.

1. 20 years of Text Mining Applications
with GATE:
from Donald Trump to curing cancer
Dr. Diana Maynard
University of Sheffield, UK

2. What if I told you I have a
text mining tool which
can….

3. 1. Tell you all about your favourite sports star

4. 2. Help companies understand their market

5. 3. Tell you if a rumour on social media is true

6. 4. Help disaster victims get aid quickly
Find mentions of locations in the
text, match them to a knowledge
base, and plot them on a map
6

7. • How important and urgent is
the message?
• What actions need to be
taken?

8. 5. Find out who’s getting abused on Twitter
Which political group gets
the most hate speech?

10. 6. Analyse societal debates
• Find, annotate and index
tweets to understand,
visualise and explore:
• Topics
• Sentiments and emotion
• Who is participating?
• How do debates evolve?

11. Find all tweets where a
Conservative MP talked
about the economy

12. 7. Figure out what Trump is ranting about
12
Good luck with
this one!

13. 8. Find out who
talked about
what in the UK
elections

14. 9. Get people to change their environmental
behaviour
• People in different behavioural stages of change communicate
differently (different emotions, language use etc.)
Pajarito @lindopajarito . 2h
Our building needs 40% of all energy consumed in Switzerland! L
DJPajarito @DJPajaritoGenial . 12h
I'm so proud when I remember to save energy and I know
however small it's helping.
Desirability: Negative sentiment (expressing personal frustration-
anger/sadness)
Buzz: Positive sentiment (happiness/joy). I/we + present tense
HotelPajarito @HotelPajarito . 18h
Join us today today to switch of a light for EH! J
Invitation: Positive sentiment (happy) + use of vocatives You are an organisation,
not an individual!

15. Social media
analyser

16. The peritoneum
contains deposits
of tumour... the
tumour cells are
negative for
desmin.
70% of medical information
is in free text
GATE structures the free text
portion of the medical record
Link the text to
external
knowledge,
terminologies
and coding
schemes, for
intelligent search
and analysis
As used by several UK hospitals
and world-leading medical record
software vendors
10. Cure cancer!

17. Oh, and it’s free and
open-source.

18. More info
• GATE at http://gate.ac.uk
• Tools for analysis of hate speech on Twitter:
http://gate4ugc.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-tools-behind-our-
ge17-election.html
• Brexit analysis blogs by Nesta:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/network-analysis-top-eu-
referendum-tweeters
• Brexit study blog posts from Sheffield:
http://gate4ugc.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Brexit
• UK elections monitor http://gate.ac.uk/projects/pft
• D. Maynard, I. Roberts, M. A. Greenwood, D. Rout and K.
Bontcheva. A Framework for Real-time Semantic Social Media
Analysis. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the
World Wide Web, 2017

19. Acknowledgements
Current work supported by:
• the European Union/EU under the Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) theme of the 7th Framework
and H2020 Programmes for R&D
● SoBigData (654024) http://www.sobigdata.eu
● COMRADES (687847) http://www.comrades-project.eu
● OpenMinted (654021) http://openminted.eu
● Kconnect (644753) http://www.kconnect.eu/
● Nesta http://nesta.org.uk