15. The method of claim 8 , further comprising: extracting metadata from unstructured text documents.
8. A method of determining one or more causal factors for an observation comprising: accessing unstructured data from one or more sources of text; processing text from the unstructured data to extract features from the unstructured data; receiving an instruction from a user to execute a report based on features extracted from the unstructured data; receiving an instruction to determine the one or more causal factors associated with an observation from the report that is selected by the user; determining, by a processor, a baseline for comparison with the selected observation, the baseline being determined by the user as either data comprising one or more features in which the observation is not present or the data originating in a particular time period comprising one or more features in which the observation is present; determining, by a processor, the one or more causal factors associated with the selected observation by calculating an impact of one or more of the features of the unstructured data on the observation selected by the user using the baseline for comparison with the observation selected, at least one of the one or more causal factors comprising one or more of the features, and the impact on a measurable characteristic of the observation selected being calculated based on a comparison of one or more of the features of the unstructured data associated with the presence of the observation and features of the unstructured data associated with the baseline, the measurable characteristic being a volume-based metric, a sentiment metric, a satisfaction metric, or another user-defined metric; ranking, by the processor, the one or more causal factors based on a measure of statistical association to the selected observation; and presenting results to the user.