Text Mining: open Source Tokenization Tools – An Analysis

Abstract

Text mining is the process of extracting interesting and non-trivial knowledge or information from unstructured text data. Text mining is the multidisciplinary field which draws on data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, computational linguistics and statistics. Important text mining processes are information extraction, information retrieval, natural language processing, text classification, content analysis and text clustering. All these processes are required to complete the preprocessing step before doing their intended task. Pre-processing significantly reduces the size of the input text documents and the actions involved in this step are sentence boundary determination, natural language specific stop-word elimination, tokenization and stemming. Among this, the most essential and important action is the tokenization. Tokenization helps to divide the textual information into individual words. For performing tokenization process, there are many open source tools are available. The main objective of this work is to analyze the performance of the seven open source tokenization tools. For this comparative analysis, we have taken Nlpdotnet Tokenizer, Mila Tokenizer, NLTK Word Tokenize, TextBlob Word Tokenize, MBSP Word Tokenize, Pattern Word Tokenize and Word Tokenization with Python NLTK. Based on the results, we observed that the Nlpdotnet Tokenizer tool performance is better than other tools.