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Back to Learn
KnowledgeLayer 3Pattern Recognition

Corpus Analysis

You have 3 years of customer support tickets, team meeting notes, and internal documentation.

Someone asks "What are the most common problems customers complain about?"

You spend a week reading through documents, making notes, and trying to find patterns manually.

The answer was in there. You just needed a way to see across all of it at once.

8 min read
intermediate
Relevant If You're
Extracting insights from large document collections
Finding patterns across support tickets, feedback, or communications
Understanding what themes emerge across company knowledge

POWERFUL for any organization with accumulated text. Turns unstructured history into structured insight.

Where This Sits

Category 3.3: Pattern Recognition

3
Layer 3

Understanding & Analysis

Pattern ExtractionAnomaly DetectionTrend AnalysisCorpus Analysis
Explore all of Layer 3
What It Is

A way to analyze thousands of documents and extract what they have in common

Corpus analysis looks at a collection of documents as a whole rather than one at a time. Instead of reading 500 support tickets individually, you ask: "What themes appear across all of these? What topics keep coming up? What patterns emerge?"

The AI processes your entire corpus, clusters similar content together, identifies recurring themes, and surfaces the patterns you would never spot reading document by document. Three years of customer complaints become "47% are about billing confusion, 28% are about onboarding, 15% are about improvement suggestions."

Reading documents one by one tells you what happened. Corpus analysis tells you what keeps happening.

The Lego Block Principle

Corpus analysis solves a universal problem: how do you understand what a large collection of information is really about? Any organization with accumulated documents, communications, or records benefits from seeing patterns across the whole.

The core pattern:

Take a collection of documents. Group similar ones together. Identify what themes emerge most frequently. Surface the patterns that would be invisible reading one at a time. Turn "we have a lot of data" into "here is what our data says."

Where else this applies:

Support ticket analysis - Find the top 5 problems customers experience across thousands of tickets.
Meeting note synthesis - Discover what topics dominate team discussions quarter over quarter.
Documentation audit - Identify gaps and redundancies across your knowledge base.
Communication patterns - Understand what your team talks about most in Slack or email.
Interactive: Analyze a Support Ticket Corpus

Run analysis and watch patterns emerge from chaos

This corpus contains 20 support tickets. Click "Analyze Corpus" to discover what themes emerge.

Corpus: 20 support tickets
Time to read manually: ~45 minutes | Time for analysis: ~2 seconds

Theme Distribution

Click "Analyze Corpus" to see results

Sample Tickets

Tickets will appear here after analysis

Try it: Click "Analyze Corpus" to see how patterns emerge from a collection of support tickets. This simulates what happens when you run corpus analysis on your real data.
How It Works

Three approaches to understanding what your documents say

Topic Modeling

Discover latent themes

Algorithms like LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) analyze word co-occurrence patterns to discover topics that exist across your documents. No predefined categories needed. The themes emerge from the data itself.

Pro: Finds themes you did not know existed
Con: Topics can be abstract or hard to label

Document Clustering

Group similar documents

Convert documents to vectors (embeddings) and group similar ones together. A support ticket about "payment failed" clusters with other payment-related tickets. You see natural groupings emerge.

Pro: Creates actionable categories
Con: Requires choosing the number of clusters

Frequency Analysis

Count what matters

Extract entities, keywords, or phrases and count their frequency across the corpus. Simple but powerful. "Refund" appears in 847 tickets. "API error" appears in 312. "Login" appears in 289.

Pro: Easy to understand and verify
Con: Misses semantic similarity (different words, same meaning)
Connection Explorer

"What are the top 5 problems our customers experience?"

Your operations lead needs to prioritize support improvements. You have 3,000 tickets from the past 2 years. Reading them would take weeks. Corpus analysis processes all of them and returns: "1. Billing confusion (47%), 2. Onboarding friction (28%), 3. Improvement suggestions (15%), 4. Integration issues (7%), 5. Account access (3%)."

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Knowledge Storage
Chunking Strategies
Corpus Analysis
You Are Here
Pattern Extraction
Topic Detection
Priority Dashboard
Outcome
React Flow
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Foundation
Data Infrastructure
Intelligence
Outcome

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Upstream (Requires)

Chunking StrategiesKnowledge Storage

Downstream (Enables)

Pattern ExtractionTopic DetectionContext Assembly
Common Mistakes

What breaks when corpus analysis goes wrong

Don't analyze without cleaning first

You run analysis on raw documents. The top "theme" is email signatures, meeting boilerplate, and template text. The actual content is buried under noise. Your insights are about formatting, not substance.

Instead: Strip boilerplate, remove signatures, clean formatting artifacts before analysis. Garbage in, garbage out.

Don't ignore the context of individual documents

Corpus analysis shows "pricing" is your top topic. You assume customers are confused about pricing. Turns out half those mentions are your team discussing pricing internally. The corpus mixed two very different document types.

Instead: Segment your corpus by source, type, or timeframe. Analyze customer-facing vs internal separately.

Don't expect perfect categories to emerge automatically

The algorithm clusters documents into 5 groups. Group 3 contains both "improvement suggestions" and "bug reports" because they use similar language. You treat them the same. They need opposite responses.

Instead: Treat automatic clustering as a starting point. Validate clusters by sampling. Refine with human judgment.

Next Steps

Now that you understand corpus analysis

You have learned how to extract patterns from document collections. The next step is understanding how to use these patterns to detect specific topics in new incoming documents.

Recommended Next

Topic Detection

How to classify new documents based on the themes you discovered