Patent ID: 7558778

Claim:
A method for exploring and organizing a first electronic corpus of documents stored in a computer storage medium, the method comprising the steps of: performing at least one of reviewing the text of the documents from the first electronic corpus of documents in a concordance form, collecting terms from the first electronic corpus of documents in order to build semantically related terms, or collecting documents from the first electronic corpus of documents in order to build semantically related documents clusters; creating a first set, the first set having at least one category applying to at least one of the words and phrases in gazetteers, or at least one document in the semantically related document clusters; creating a second set, the second set having at least one of a candidate document cluster or a candidate words and phrases list; evaluating the second set based upon a set of predetermined factors in order to create a third set, where the third set includes at least one document semantically related to the candidate clusters or at least one semantically related word and phrase related to the candidate words and phrases that meet at least one of the predetermined factors; and selectively substituting the third set for the first set in a subsequent iteration of the method for exploring; where the performing step is performed in at least one of an unsupervised mode or a semi-supervised mode; further comprising the step of identifying contexts in which the first set of words and phrases occur; further comprising the step of formatting the contexts so that substantially similar candidate contexts are identified in the second corpus; and further comprising the step of using the formatted contexts and proposing additional candidate terms with their respective proposed category assignments, based on associations between known contexts, the candidate contexts generated relative thereto, and the terms for the first corpus.