Abstract: A parsing system and method are provided in which the break characters in the document are used to rapidly parse the document and extract one or more key phrases from the document which characterize the document. The break characters in the document may include explicit break characters, such as punctuation, soft stop words and hard stop words. The determination of which phrases in the document are extracted depends upon the type of break character appearing after the phrase in the document.

Abstract: A content-based system and method for text processing and retrieval is provided wherein a plurality of pieces of text are processed based on content to generate an index for each piece of text, the index comprising a list of phrases that represent the content of the piece of text. The phrases are grouped together to generate clusters based on a degree of relationship of the phrases, and a hierarchical structure is generated, the hierarchical structure comprising a plurality of maps, each map corresponding to a predetermined degree of relationship, the map graphically depicting the clusters at the predetermined degree of relationship, and comprising a plurality of nodes, each node representing a cluster, and a plurality of links connecting nodes that are related. The map is displayed to a user, a user selects a particular cluster on the map, and a portion of text is extracted from said pieces of text based on the cluster selected by the user.