Abstract: A phrase extraction system combines a dictionary method, a statistical/heuristic approach, and a set of pruning steps to extract frequently occurring and interesting phrases from a corpus. The system finds the “top k” phrases in a corpus, where k is an adjustable parameter. For a time-varying corpus, the system uses historical statistics to extract new and increasingly frequent phrases. The system finds interesting phrases that occur near a set of user-designated phrases. The system uses these designated phrases as anchor phrases to identify phrases that occur near the anchor phrases. The system finds frequently occurring and interesting phrases in a time-varying corpus is changing in time, as in finding frequent phrases in an on-going, long term document feed or continuous, regular web crawl.

Abstract: The present invention provides a method and system of extracting information about references to entities from a plurality of electronic documents. In an exemplary embodiment, the method and system include (1) applying at least one document quality measure to each of the plurality of electronic documents, (2) recognizing the references to entities in the plurality of electronic documents, (3) using at least one reference quality measure for each of the references to entities, (4) computing at least one topical category associated with each of the references to entities, (5) finding at least one co-occurring term associated with each of the references to entities, and (6) characterizing each of the references to entities by at least one characteristic category.