9. A method as in claim 3 , wherein the step of extracting candidate phrases from the text corpus further comprises the step of adding phrase templates and/or noncontiguous phrases to the first set of candidate phrases in accordance with one or more predetermined criteria.
9. A method as in claim 3 , wherein the step of extracting candidate phrases from the text corpus further comprises the step of adding phrase templates and/or noncontiguous phrases to the first set of candidate phrases in accordance with one or more predetermined criteria. 11. A method as in claim 9 , wherein the step of adding phrase templates and/or non-contiguous phrases further comprises the steps of: determining the frequency of occurrence in the first set of candidate phrases of word pairs such that each word of the word pair is separated by no more than a predetermined number of words; and identifying word pairs that occur with greater than a predetermined frequency to enable identification of phrase templates and/or non-contiguous phrases containing such word pairs.