1. A method of performing trend analysis of speech, the method comprising: receiving, as part of a speech trend analysis request, a set of candidate feature constraints, an objective function with respect to a speech trend to be analyzed, and a set of speech record constraints to be applied to a group of speech records; selecting a subset of speech records from the group of speech records based on the set of speech record constraints to yield selected speech records; identifying features in the selected speech records based on the set of candidate feature constraints to yield identified features; assigning a weight to each of the identified features based on the objective function; ranking the identified features by their respective weights to yield ranked identified features; and outputting at least one of the ranked identified features associated with a speech-based trend in response to the speech trend analysis request.