Semi-related: You might want to take a look at this blog entry: http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/02/skygrid-and-the.html http://billburnham.blog

Semi-related: You might want to take a look at this blog entry: http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/02/skygrid-and-the.html http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2008/02/skygrid-an... It's about a startup that has accomplished some cool things in the area of recognizing meaning from text. They've developed some "sentiment"-measuring algorithms that allow them to classify articles into "good" or "bad", for the purposes of deciding whether to invest in a stock. Pretty cool stuff! Perhaps it might give you some ideas on similar approaches you could apply to your problem.