Patent 7461056 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on December, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method for extracting key terms and associated key terms for use in text mining is provided. The method includes receiving unstructured text documents, such as emails over a customer service system. Term candidates are extracted based on identifying consecutive word strings satisfying a context independency threshold. Term candidates are weighted using mutual information to generate a list of weighted terms. The weighted terms are then recounted. Terms are associated based on Chi-square values. Associated terms can then be used for information retrieval. A user interface can be personalized with individual user profiles.