Uncovering text mining: A survey of current work on web-based epidemic intelligence

Real world pandemics such as SARS 2002 as well as popular fiction like the movie Contagion graphically depict the health threat of a global pandemic and the key role of epidemic intelligence (EI). While EI relies heavily on established indicator sources a new class of methods based on event alerting from unstructured digital Internet media is rapidly becoming acknowledged within the public health community. At the heart of automated information gathering systems is a technology called text mining. My contribution here is to provide an overview of the role that text mining technology plays in detecting epidemics and to synthesise my existing research on the BioCaster project.