A system and method for identifying trending topics in a document corpus are provided. First, multiple topics are identified, some of which topics may be filtered or removed based on co-occurrence. Then, for each remaining topic, a frequency of the topic in the document corpus is determined, one or more frequencies of the topic in one or more other document corpora are determined, a trending score of the topic is generated based on the determined frequencies. Lastly, the remaining topics are ranked based on the generated trending scores.