Patent ID: 8725717

Claim:
A system for identifying topics for short text communications, comprising: a receipt module to receive one or more social status updates from one or more social networking sources; an extraction module to extract tokens from text of one or more of the social status updates; a topic generator to generate topics for at least one of the social status updates based on a set of documents separate from the social status updates from which the tokens are extracted, comprising: a query module to generate a single query using all of the tokens extracted from the social status update and to apply the query to the separate set of documents; a result identification module to identify those documents in the separate set that match one or more tokens in the query as search results; a threshold module to identify salient terms within each of the search results; an identification module to identify one or more of the salient terms within the search results that occur in one or more of the social status updates as update salient terms and to identify one or more of the salient terms within the search results that are absent from the social status updates as result salient terms; an update topic module to determine the topics for the social status update based on the update salient terms, comprising: an update score module to assign each of the update salient terms within the search results a voting score based on a number of different search results in which the update salient term is located; a topic threshold module to apply a topic threshold to the score for each update salient term and to designate those of the update salient terms whose scores satisfy the topic threshold as the topics; and an update storage module to store the update salient terms whose scores do not satisfy the topic threshold as topic suggestions; a result topic module to determine the topics for the social status update based on the result salient terms, comprising: a result score module to assign each of the result salient terms within the search results a voting score based on a number of different search results in which the result salient term is located; a different threshold module to apply a different threshold to the score for each of the result salient terms and to designate those result salient terms whose scores satisfy the different threshold as the topics; and a result storage module to store the result salient terms whose scores do not satisfy the different threshold as the topic suggestions; a filter module to filter the social status updates based on at least one of the topics of the social status updates, times associated with the social status updates, the sources of the social status updates, and creators of the social status updates; an update display module to display the filtered social status updates; a tag cloud module to display in a tag cloud the topics of the displayed filtered social status updates; and a processor to execute the modules.