A method for expanding an initial ontology via processing of communication data, wherein the initial ontology is a structural representation of language elements comprising a set of entities, a set of terms, a set of term-entity associations, a set of entity-association rules, a set of abstract relations, and a set of relation instances. A method for extracting a set of significant phrases and a set of significant phrase co-occurrences from an input set of documents further includes utilizing the terms to identify relations within the training set of communication data, wherein a relation is a pair of terms that appear in proximity to one another.