The amount of textual data that produce every minute on the internet is extremely high. Processing of this tremendous volume of mostly unstructured data is not a straightforward function. But the enormous amount of useful information that lay down on them motivate scientists to investigate efficient and effective techniques and algorithms to discover meaningful patterns. Social network applications provide opportunities for people around the world to be in contact and share their valuable knowledge, such as chat, comments, and discussion boards. People usually do not care about spelling and accurate grammatical construction of a sentence in everyday life conversations. Therefore, extracting information from such datasets are more complicated. Text mining can be a solution to this problem. Text mining is a knowledge discovery process used to extract patterns from natural language. Application of text mining techniques on social networking websites can reveal a significant amount of information. Text mining in conjunction with social networks can be used for finding a general opinion about any special subject, human thinking patterns, and group identification. In this study, we investigate machine learning methods in textual data in six chapters. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection