New Frontiers in Textual Data Analysis

Data usually comes in a plethora of formats and dimensions, rendering the information extraction and exploration processes challenging. Thus, being able to perform exploratory analyses of the data with the intent of having an immediate glimpse of some of the data properties is becoming crucial. Exploratory analyses should be simple enough to avoid complicated declarative languages (such as SQL) and mechanisms, while at the same time retaining the flexibility and expressiveness of such languages. Recently, we have witnessed a rediscovery of the so-called example-based methods, in which the user, or analyst, circumvents query languages by using examples as input.