Text Filtering Framework

Introduction

Massive data environments (such as the World Wide Web) offer the promise of accessing great amounts of useful information. However, the reality is that a wide distribution of data and variety forms of presentation makes it difficult for users to precisely specify their search requirement and process the results. Clearly, there is a real need for text filtering tools that can cope with the burgeoning information resources. Text filtering has also become very important in text mining, knowledge discovery , biological information extraction etc. Construction of appropriate text filtering components from scratch is very time consuming and not always practical. To facilitate the reuse of design and code thus reducing time and cost both in program development and maintenance a framework is proposed. This thesis project presents such a framework developed using Framework XP, a variant of Extreme Programming (XP). The Text Filtering Framework (TFF) will act as a skeleton for a set of applications that can be customized by the application developer. Three applications were developed using TFF to evaluate the framework; the use of TFF has greatly simplified the development effort.