Text mining is a process that derives meaningful information from text through techniques of artificial intelligence such as turning text into numbers. It involves preprocessing text through steps like cleanup and tokenization, transforming text using methods like bag-of-words and vector space models, selecting features, applying data mining techniques, and evaluating the output. Text mining has applications in areas like web mining, medical fields, and resume filtering by automatically analyzing texts from open-ended surveys, warranty claims, interviews, and competitor websites.