A few weeks ago, New Scientist published a short news item about Jon Kleinberg's (Cornell) research into word bursts. Basically, by tracking the trends in the frequency of words appearing in published documents, you can identify emerging trends. Kleinberg used actual published documents, but it can obviously be used with electronic (web) content, too. Some interesting reactions to the work:
Word bursts within BBC search logs
Word Bursts and Trend Spotting (gets a bit mathematical).
Posted by Karl
March 12, 2003 08:54 AM