A Pilot Study on Applying Text Mining Tools to Analyzing Steel Industry Trends : A Case Study of the Steel Industry for the Company “P”

Abstract

It becomes more and more important for business survival to have the ability to predict the future with uncertainties increasing faster and faster. To predict the future, text mining tools are one of the main candidate other than traditional quantitative analyses, but those efforts are still at their infancy. This paper is to introduce one of those efforts using the case of company “P” in the steel industry. Even with only four month pilot studies, we found strong possibilities, if not testified robustly, to predict future industrial trends using text mining tools. For these text mining case studies, we categorized steel industry trend keywords into ten components (10 categories) to study ten different subjects for each category. Once found any meaningful changes in a trend, we had investigated in more detail what and how some trend happened so. To be more roust, firstly we need to define more cleary the purpose of text mining analyses. Then we need to categorize industry trend key words in a more systematic way using systems thinking models. With these improvements, we are quite sure that applying text mining tools to analyzing industry trends will contribute to predicting the future industry trends as well as to identifying the unseen trends otherwise.