Patent ID: 8577884

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for summarizing free-form comments in survey response data, the method comprising: receiving survey responses from a plurality of respondents to a survey, the survey including a series of entries to identify respondent information and a free-form comment area; extracting, by a computing device, text from the free-form comment area of a survey response of each respondent, and storing the text as a respondent document in a survey database including a plurality of respondent documents representing respondents' answers to the survey; identifying, by the computing device, a plurality of topic words from the text of the free-form comment area of each survey response in the survey database; computing, by the computing device, a weight for each of the plurality of topic words, wherein the weight indicates a relevance of the topic word in the free-form comment area of each survey response in the survey database; assigning, by the computing device, one or more of the plurality of topic words to each respondent document in the survey database; identifying, by the computing device, one or more discrete topics associated with certain combinations of topic words, each combination of topic words based upon a certain proximity between the topic words within the respondent document, a grammatical user of the topic words, and a high document weight for each of those topic words; for each of the identified one or more discrete topics, computing, by the computing device, a count of number of respondent documents in the survey database associated with the each of the identified one or more discrete topics and based upon document weights computed for each topic word in an associated combination of topic words that exceed a threshold value; and generating, by the computing device, a report comprising an indication of a relative importance of each of the identified one or more discrete topics based upon the count of the number of respondent documents in the survey database computed for each of the identified one or more discrete topics.