Abstract: A method for determining significant words or phrases within social media data includes receiving a stream of data from at least one social media source. The stream includes one or more words or phrases along with corresponding time stamps indicating when the word/phrase was used. One or more words/phrases to be analyzed is determined from the stream. A time period of interest is identified. The time period is divided into a plurality of non-overlapping time windows. The stream is analyzed within the time period of interest to determine how many instances of each words/phrases have timestamps within each time window. One or more of the words/phrases are identified as significant based on a level of co-occurrence of the words/phrases related to the determination as to how many instances of each words/phrases have timestamps within each window.