Patent ID: 7003517

Claim:
A text mining system that permits an application service provider to provide data identifying prospective customers of a product or service provided by a product/service provider, comprising: a data acquisition process for extracting text documents from unstructured Internet discussion sites selected from the group consisting of: newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists; wherein each discussion site comprises a collection of text documents generated by participants of the discussion site and broadcasted to multiple participants of the discussion site; an archive database for storing the extracted text documents; a text mining server for receiving queries from the product/service provider, each query representing a request for information about participants who are discussing a specified product or service; wherein the text mining server responds to each query by intruding into the Internet discussion site independently of, and without activation by the participants of the discussion site; wherein the text mining server is further operable to analyze data in the database, to provide the product/service provider with text mining outputs representing themes extracted from the data, and a link to at least one document stored in the database that contains information identifying a prospective customer who is discussing the product or service; and a web server for providing access to the text mining server via a web browser and the Internet, such that the product/service provider may interact with the text mining server to make the requests on line via the Internet and to receive the outputs generated by the text mining server; wherein the at least one link enables the product/service provider to access a text document from the archive database via the web browser.