We will explore the use of natural language proessing and text analytics to organize, and mine textual data sources. We will investigate tools and techniques for preprocessing (e.g., removing noise from) unstructured textual data sources; representing words, phrases, and sentences; tokenizing text streams; named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging; sentiment analysis; text classification; and information retrieval. We will focus our discussion on the practical application of these techniques, especially in the case of social media monitoring.