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This FREE pre-conference workshop is open to anyone who registers and has an interest in text and data mining.  To help us gauge the attendance, please register for the workshop.

Description of Workshop

The workshop offers an introduction to Text and Data Mining (TDM), presenting the legal considerations through hands-on exercises. The organisers will introduce the topic, the tools and techniques, tackle a specific problem, and then use that to expose participants to the legal complications that they may encounter in conducting their research and the legal considerations they should keep in mind when choosing a license for their works.

Potential

Text and data mining (TDM) is an important scientific technique for analyzing large corpora of articles. The technique is used to uncover both existing and new insights in unstructured data sets that typically are obtained programmatically from many different sources. A few of the innovative examples include GeoDeepDive, a system that helps geoscientists discover information and knowledge buried in the text, tables, and figures of geology journal articles; improving human curation of chemical-gene-disease networks for the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database; and discovering a new link between genes and osteoporosis.

Legal Uncertainty

While the science and technology of TDM are complex enough involving information retrieval (IR), optical character recognition (OCR), and natural language processing (NLP), the legal complications are, sadly, equally dizzying. Not only is the legal status of TDM unclear at best, it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction making cross national collaboration difficult. Besides the license status of the original material, contractual agreements between research institutions and publishers, who are often the gatekeepers of the corpora, can create significant hurdles.

In the time available, the workshop cannot provide detailed and comprehensive training in TDM, and it is certainly not a replacement for expertise in this deep and comprehensive technique. Instead, the workshop is designed to be both an introduction to basic technical and legal concepts as well as an opportunity to get to network with experts as well as novices with interest in the field. It is hoped that as a result, participants intending to use TDM for their work will be better informed when seeking collaboration with TDM experts.