process of analysing text to extract information from it. Text mining is different from (web) search where the user is typically looking for something that is already known and has been written by someone else. In text mining, the main focus is to discover heretofore unknown information. Text mining is a variation on a field called data mining, that tries to find interesting patterns from large databases. In contrast to data minning in text mining the patterns are extracted from natural language text rather than from structured databases of facts.

Source: Hearst, Marti (2003).  What is text mining?
Online: https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/text-mining.html