Marti Hearst SIMS,UC Berkeley hearst@sims.berkeley.edu October 17, 2003 I wrote this essay for people who are curious about the topic of text mining after having read the New York Times article by Lisa Guernsey (10/16/2003) or heard my Future Tense interview with Jon Gordon (10/20/2003). What is text mining? What are its potential applications and limitations? Text Mining is the discovery by compu