[BiO BB] New course: MSc in Text Mining at UManchester, UK

[John McNaught]

(Although not focussing exclusively on biotext mining, this course may
be of interest to Bioinformatics students)


                      Masters in Text Mining

                       School of Informatics

                    University of Manchester, UK

Text mining is concerned with finding previously unsuspected knowledge
through large-scale processing of unstructured text. It involves
identifying relevant information (information retrieval), extracting facts
of interest to the user from the identified texts (information extraction) 
and discovery of associations among the facts extracted from many different
texts (data mining).

Text mining finds application in many areas: competitive intelligence for
business, hypothesis generation for scientists, predictive toxicology,
patent searching, provision of metadata for digital libraries to 
enable conceptual search, sentiment analysis, database curation, fraud
detection, disaster planning and defence against terrorism, to mention a
few.

It is an exciting growth area that supports scientists and knowledge
workers in academia, business and government. It is interdisciplinary, as
it leverages techniques from different fields, and it serves 
very practical needs in many domains. There is currently a lack of people 
with advanced training in text mining.

This programme helps you to develop expertise in the methodologies and 
technologies for developing text mining software. The programme focuses 
upon natural language processing, data mining and information retrieval 
approaches.

An additional course unit on industrial applications of text mining helps you 
to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and the deployment of that 
knowledge in organisations. The course unit introduces you
to a wide variety of external speakers and real case-studies, and encourages 
you to develop report-writing and presentational skills to analyse 
cutting-edge text mining technology issues across the public and private 
sectors.

The course runs from early October to mid-September, with teaching taking
place in over 2 semesters followed by research on a dissertation topic for
around 3 months over the summer period.

Careers include specialists in knowledge and information management, in use of 
IT in archives, libraries, and knowledge analyst to support researchers 
in a wide variety of disciplines. 

This MSc also leads directly into PhD level research in the area.

The University of Manchester hosts the National Centre for Text Mining
(funded by the JISC, BBSRC and EPSRC), the first such publicly-funded centre 
in the world. Academic members of the Centre (www.nactem.ac.uk) will 
be closely involved in the teaching of this course, thus you will benefit
from both theoretical and practical experience and from exposure to robust, 
efficient, scalable text mining tools.

Entry requirements:

Computing-related first degree. Degree class of 2i (or overseas equivalent).
Applicants are required to provide evidence of ability in both spoken and 
written English, and one of the following minimum qualifications should be 
held: GCSE English Language (Grade C or higher), TOEFL>570/230 or IELTS>6.5.

Course Units:

Data Mining
Information Management
Information Retrieval
Knowledge Representation and Semantic Web
Natural Language Processing
Research and Professional Development
Text Mining Applications and Systems 

Contact:
The MSc Admissions Office
School of Informatics
The University of Manchester
PO Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD
Telephone: +44 (0)161 306 1299
Email: pg-informatics at manchester.ac.uk

Apply:
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/postgraduate/howtoapply/

Further information:
http://www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk/programmes/pg_programme_list.php

Brochure:
http://www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk/programmes/InformaticsPGbrochure.pdf

 



--
John McNaught
Associate Director
National Centre for Text Mining

and
School of Informatics
University of Manchester      	mail: John.McNaught at manchester.ac.uk
PO Box 88	           
Sackville Street          	tel: +44.161.306.3098
Manchester                	fax: +44.161.306.1281
M60 1QD				web: www.nactem.ac.uk
UK				     www.informatics.manchester.ac.uk