Patent ID: 7739286

Claim:
A method, comprising: (a) generating, by a computer system, a plurality of queries based on a topic language model including content specific to a topic of interest and a background language model including content specific to the topic of interest and general content, the plurality of queries specific to the topic of interest; (b) querying, by the computer system, a large database of documents using the plurality of queries; (c) receiving, by the computer system, responsive to said querying, a plurality of documents that satisfy the plurality of queries; (d) classifying, by the computer system, each of the received plurality of documents to assign a respective document score indicating a relevance of a document to the plurality of queries; (e) including, by the computer system, one or more documents of the plurality of documents in a rejection model, wherein each of the one or more documents in the rejection model have a document score less than an average document score for the plurality of documents, wherein each of the one or more documents in the rejection model are less likely to satisfy the plurality of queries compared to remaining documents of the plurality of documents; (f) updating, by a computer system, the topic language model and the background language model based on documents of the plurality of documents that have not been rejected by the rejection model; and (g) iterating, by a computer system, steps (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), and (f) by replacing the topic language model and the background language model with the updated topic language model and the updated background language model, respectively, wherein each of the plurality of documents are scored at an utterance level to assign an utterance score for an utterance based on the topic language model, the background model, document weight for the tonic and document weight for the background, wherein an utterance includes a plurality of word clusters, each word cluster including one or more words, each document includes one or more utterances, a respective score for each document obtained based on scores of utterances in the document.