How to select alternatives with high social support for modernisation of irrigation?

Since 2002, significant initiatives regarding water have been performed in Spain in the framework of successive national plans for irrigation, which have lead to a decrease in water use consumption despite a slight increase of the irrigated surface. Modernization of irrigation has been founded on the transformation of surface irrigation into pressurized irrigation systems, mainly drip irrigation. In spite of the big investments, problems have been detected related to the adaptation of irrigation societies to the new irrigation infrastructures. The question of the modernization of traditional irrigation in the South of Alicante province arises now. In the light of experience so far in other regions, taking into account the positions of all the agents involved in the process appears as a determinant to guarantee the success of modernization. That is, the actions that the administrations are willing to subsidise, the main problems and solutions that the farmers require, and the impact of the irrigation actions on the environment and the ecosystem services provided by traditional agriculture. In 2016 a conference was organised in the EPSO-UMH to discuss about the difficulties and future prospects of traditional irrigation in the Low Segura River Basin, in the South of Alicante province, in which of all the involved sectors took part. Representatives of Local Administrations, irrigating producers and environmentalists exposed their positions throughout their presentations, emphasising the most important aspects. The information explained in these presentations can be analysed from a subjective point of view, or my means of data mining techniques, such as text mining, which allows to analyse unstructured texts (natural language), in order to automatically interpret their meaning, and extract relevant concepts and relations between them to answer questions of interest. In this paper text mining techniques are applied to determine the most relevant ideas of each group of agents in their approach of modernisation of traditional irrigation, so as the information can be used to propose technical solutions of modernisation which are acceptable by all the involved actors.