Workshop on Mining Unstructured Data (MUD) because "Mining Unstructured Data is Like Fishing in Muddy Waters"!

In software development, the knowledge of developers, architects and end users is spread out across dozens of development artifacts. Historically, structured development artifacts such as source code have been the primary focus of software engineering research, but the last couple of years have seen a dramatic increase of research on unstructured data, such as free-form text requirements and specifications, mailing lists and bug reports. Mining such data is very challenging, since it typically requires dealing with natural language fragments. Research communities in information retrieval, data mining and natural language processing have explored techniques to mine unstructured data. These techniques are usually limited in scope and intended for use in specific scenarios. We feel that the knowledge gathered by these research efforts should be consolidated and propagated to the empirical software engineering communities. The MUD (Mining Unstructured Data) workshop aims to provide a highly interactive forum for researchers and developers to put challenges of, solutions for and experiences with mining unstructured data into a common reference frame and to build connections between the various communities.