Patent ID: 7340466

Claim:
A method to identify topics in a data corpus having a plurality of segments, comprising: determining a segment-level actual usage value for one or more word combinations, wherein a word combination includes two or more substantially contiguous words, wherein two words are substantially contiguous if they are separated by zero words or words selected from a predetermined list of words; computing a segment-level expected usage value for each of the one or more word combinations in accordance with S(w i )xS(w j ) x . . . x S(w m )/N m−1 where “m” represents the number of words in the word combination, “N” represents the number of segments in the data corpus, and S(w) represents the number of unique segments in the data corpus that word w i of the word combination is in; designating a word combination as a topic if the segment level actual usage value of the word combination is greater than the segment-level expected usage value of the word combination; and storing the topic on a computer readable storage medium.