The majority of medical documents and electronic health records are in text format that poses a challenge for data processing and finding relevant documents. Looking for ways to automatically retrieve the enormous amount of health and medical knowledge has always been an intriguing topic. Powerful methods have been developed in recent years to make the text processing automatic. One of the popular approaches to retrieve information based on discovering the themes in health and medical corpora is topic modeling; however, this approach still needs new perspectives. In this research, we describe fuzzy latent semantic analysis (FLSA), a novel approach in topic modeling using fuzzy perspective. FLSA can handle health and medical corpora redundancy issue and provides a new method to estimate the number of topics. The quantitative evaluations show that FLSA produces superior performance and features to latent Dirichlet allocation, the most popular topic model.
The enormous amount of information stored in unstructured texts cannot simply be used for further processing by computers, which typically handle text as simple sequences of character strings. Therefore, specific (pre-)processing methods and algorithms are required in order to extract useful patterns. Text mining refers generally to the process of extracting interesting information and knowledge from unstructured text. In this article, we discuss text mining as a young and interdisciplinary field in the intersection of the related areas information retrieval, machine learning, statistics, computational linguistics and especially data mining. We describe the main analysis tasks preprocessing, classification, clustering, information extraction and visualization. In addition, we briefly discuss a number of successful applications of text mining.