1. A method of generating topic words from at least one seed word and a collection of electronic documents comprising the steps of: a. identifying keywords in each document that are indicative of the topic of the document; b. evaluating the relevance of each of the documents to the at least one seed word; c. identifying at least one key topic document that is relevant to the at least one seed word; d. selecting a subset of the documents, referred to as topic documents, by an iterative process starting with the selection of the at least one key topic document and then selecting other documents if their keywords are sufficiently similar to the keywords contained in the previously selected topic documents; and e. extracting a set of topic words from the topic documents, wherein the steps of the method are performed by a computer processor running software.