Report on KDD conference 2004 panel discussion can natural language processing help text mining?

With large amounts of text data now available on-line, both on the Internet and in corporate repositories, text mining is an area of growing interest. Historically, Data Mining researchers have come out of the statistics, database and machine learning communities. Despite a few exceptions, it has by and large had little interaction with the computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) community. Given that the subject matter of text mining is free text, one might naturally assume techniques developed over the last few decades in computational linguistics and NLP, should make big contributions towards the younger field of text mining. However, other than in the area of information extraction, empirical evidence has not borne this out.