A method for identifying emerging concepts in unstructured text streams comprises: selecting a subset V of documents from a set U of documents; generating at least one Boolean combination of terms that partitions the set U into a plurality of categories that represent a generalized, statistically based model of the selected subset V wherein the categories are disjoint inasmuch as each document of U is included in only one category of the partition; and generating a descriptive label for each of the disjoint categories from the Boolean combination of terms for that category.