Abstract: A method and apparatus for extracting multi-word technical terms from a text file in a computer system. Word strings are selected from the text that have at least two words, that have at most a specified maximum number of words, that include none of a special set of selected tokens, and that only include selected characters. Word string which occur less than a specified minimum number of times in the text file are deleted. The remaining strings form a set of word strings very likely to be multi-word technical terms. Improvements on the quality of the set of word strings can be accomplished by deleting word strings which do not satisfy certain grammatical constraints.