tedster - 4:49 am on May 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

That sounds like the way I understand it, annej.

My main question right now is if this approach would need supplementary support for idioms and bigrams (two words in text but one unit of meaning). My guess is that with a large sample, co-occurence of good phrases alone could theoretcially carry the day, but I'm suspecting that this would be too academic and pure for the real world.

I'd love to get a look at this kind of phrase data - even just a sampling!