A Framework for Approaching Textual Data Science Tasks

There's an awful lot of text data available today, and enormous amounts of it are being created on a daily basis, ranging from structured to semi-structured to fully unstructured. What can we do with it? Well, quite a bit, actually; it depends on what your objectives are, but there are 2 intricately related yet differentiated umbrellas of tasks which can be exploited in order to leverage the availability of all of this data. NLP is a major aspect of computational linguistics, and also falls within the realms of computer science and artificial intelligence. Text mining exists in a similar realm as NLP, in that it is concerned with identifying interesting, non-trivial patterns in textual data.