Rada Mihalcea co-authors new book on text mining

Professor Rada Mihalcea and her collaborator Gabe Ignatow, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas, have authored a new book entitled “Text Mining: A Guidebook for the Social Sciences,” which has been published by Sage Publishing.

Online communities generate massive volumes of natural language data and the social sciences continue to learn how to best make use of this new information and the technology available for analyzing it. Text Mining brings together a broad range of contemporary qualitative and quantitative methods to provide strategic and practical guidance on analyzing large text collections. This accessible book, written by a sociologist and a computer scientist, surveys the fast-changing landscape of data sources, programming languages, software packages, and methods of analysis available today. Suitable for novice and experienced researchers alike, the book will help readers use text mining techniques more efficiently and productively.

The book is available for purchase from the publisher’s website and on Amazon. Sample materials and chapters also available at the publisher’s site.

Prof. Mihalcea’s research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and multilingual natural language processing. She is an investigator in projects that include the use of software to detect lies and the development of an advanced conversational computing system. She is involved in a number of other research projects, including word sense disambiguation, monolingual and cross-lingual semantic similarity, subjectivity, sentiment, and emotion analysis, multimodal affect analysis, and computational humor.

Prof. Rada Mihalcea received a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern Methodist University and a PhD in Linguistics from Oxford University. She joined the faculty at Michigan in 2013 after serving on the faculty at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Texas.

She is the recipient of NSF CAREER award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.