META: A Unifying Framework for the Management and Analysis of Text Data

Recent years have seen a dramatic growth of natural language text data, including web pages, news articles, scientific literature, emails, enterprise documents, and social media such as blog articles, forum posts, product reviews, and tweets. This has led to an increasing demand for powerful software tools to help people manage and analyze vast amount of text data effectively and efficiently. Unlike data generated by a computer system or sensors, text data are usually generated directly by humans for humans. First, since text data are generated by people, they are especially valuable for discovering knowledge about human opinions and preferences, in addition to many other kinds of knowledge that we encode in text. Second, since text is written for consumption by humans, humans play a critical role in any text data application system, and a text management and analysis system must involve them in the loop of text analysis.