Big Data Analytics: Open-Sourced Tools

Here are three open source text mining software tools for analyzing unstructured big data:

  1. Carrot2
  2. Weka
  3. Apache OpenNLP.

One of the great things about these three software tools is that they are free.  Thus, there is no cost per each software solution.


A Java based code, which also has a native integration with PHP, and C#/.NET API (Gonzalez-Aguilar & Ramirez Posada, 2012).  Carrot2 can organize a collection of documents into categories based on themes in a visual manner; it can also be used as a web clustering engine. Carpineto, Osinski, Romano, and Weiss (2009) stated that web clustering search engines like Carrot2 help you with fast subtopic retrievals, (i.e. searching for tiger, you can get tiger woods, tigers, Bengals, Bengals football team, etc.), Topic exploration (through a cluster hierarchy), and alleviation information overlook (does more than the first page of results search). The algorithms it uses for categorization is Lingo (Lingo3G), K-mean, and STC, which can support multiple language clustering, synonyms, etc. (Carrot, n.d.).  This software can be used online instead of regular search engines as well (Gonzalez-Aguilar & Ramirez Posada, 2012).  Gonzalez-Aguilar and Ramirez Posada (2012) explain that the interface has three phases for processing information: entry, filtration, and exit.  It represents the cluster data in three visual formats: Heatmap, Network, and pie chart.

The disadvantage of this tool is that it only does clustering analysis, but its advantage is that it can be applied to a search engine to facilitate faster and more accurate searches through its subtopic analysis.  If you would like to use Carrot2 as a search engine, go to and try it out.


It was originally developed for analyzing agricultural data and has evolved to house a comprehensive collection of data preprocessing and modeling techniques (Patel & Donga 2015).  It is a java based machine learning algorithm for data mining tasks as well as text mining that could be used for predictive modeling, housing pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization (Weka, n.d). Weka can be applied to big data (Weka, n.d.) and SQL Databases (Patel & Donga, 2015).

A disadvantage of using this tool is its lack of supporting multi-relational data mining, but if you can link all the multi-relational data into one table, it can do its job (Patel & Donga, 2015). The comprehensiveness of analysis algorithms for both data and text mining and pre-processing is its advantage.

 Apache OpenNLP

A Java code conventional machine learning toolkit, with tasks such as tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, chunking, parsing, and conference resolution (OpenNLP, n.d.) OpenNLP works well with the NetBeans and Eclipse IDE, which helps in the development process.  This tool has dependencies on Maven, UIMA Annotators, and SNAPSHOT.

The advantage of OpenNLP is that specification of rules, constraints, and lexicons don’t need to be entered in manually. Thus, it is a machine learning method which aims to maximize entropy (Buyko, Wermter, Poprat, & Hahn, 2006).  Maximizing entropy allows for collect facts consistently and uniformly.  When the sentence splitter, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, chunking, parsing, and conference resolution was tested on two medical corpora, accuracy was up in the high 90%s (Buyko et al., 2006).

This software has high accuracy as its advantage, but also produces quite a bit of false negatives which is its disadvantage.   In the sentence splitter function, it picked up literature citations, and in tokenization, it took specialized characters “-” and “/” (Buyko et al., 2006).


  • Buyko, E., Wermter, J., Poprat, M., & Hahn, U. (2006). Automatically adapting an NLP core engine to the biology domain. In Proceedings of the Joint BioLINK-Bio-Ontologies Meeting. A Joint Meeting of the ISMB Special Interest Group on Bio-Ontologies and the BioLINK Special Interest Group on Text Data M ining in Association with ISMB (pp. 65-68).
  • Carpineto, C., Osinski, S., Romano, G., and Weiss, D. 2009. A survey of web clustering engines. ACM Comput. ´ Surv. 41, 3, Article 17 (July 2009), 38 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1541880.1541884
  • Carrot (n.d.) Open source framework for building search clustering engines. Retrieved from
  • Gonzalez-Aguilar, A. AND Ramirez-Posada, M. (2012): Carrot2: Búsqueda y visualización de la información (in Spanish). El Profesional de la Informacion. Retrieved from
  • openNLP (n.d.) The Apache Software Foundation: OpenNLP. Retrieved from
  • Weka (n.d.) Weka 3: Data Mining Software in Java. Retrieved from
  • Patel, K., & Donga, J. (2015). Practical Approaches: A Survey on Data Mining Practical Tools. Foundations, 2(9).