Co-Authored by: Froelich, J., Ananyan, S.

Text mining provides a valuable tool to extract organizational knowledge from written descriptions (prose) in digitized form. Many organizations have large amounts of data of this type form, usually to the point that needles of knowledge cannot be found in the haystack of words. Text mining software provides the capability of pattern identification, visualization support to aid pattern identification, modeling support to identify or confirm relationships, and drill-down query tools to enable analysts to focus on key problem areas. Report generation tools also aid the text mining process. This article demonstrates the use of text mining in the airline domain, showing the use of incident reports can be used as a tool to increase the amount of organizational knowledge gleaned from text data. Through text mining, airlines and regulatory agencies can learn more about mechanical, organizational, and behavioral problems in a more comprehensive and timely manner. A process of text mining is demonstrated, which would enable airline analysts to verify predetermined concepts as well as to discover unexpected patterns.