1. A computer-implemented method for synthesizing and analyzing user input in a collaborative work session, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of inputs submitted by a group of users in the collaborative work session, wherein at least some of the plurality of inputs include natural language content; algorithmically analyzing the natural language content in real time in order to parse a plurality of ideas from the plurality of inputs; algorithmically identifying similarities among the plurality of ideas; clustering the plurality of ideas into a set of clusters based on the similarities; and presenting the clusters to the group of users during the collaborative work session, wherein the algorithmically analyzing, the algorithmically identifying, and the clustering are each performed at least in part using a processor, and wherein at least one user of the group of users is a synthetic participant that is independent from a moderator for the collaborative work session.