A system and method for extrapolating a set of specific representational identifiers that are represented or covered by a generic representational identifier found in a target document. Queries are constructed and performed on a corpus of source documents in which members of the extrapolated set of specific representational identifiers are compared to a database of representational data. By matching representational data in this way, any overlap between the generic representational data and specific instances of the generic representational identifier within the source documents is determined. In a more specific implementation, the system and method reduces the scope of the generic representational identifier such that the reduced scope generic representational identifier encompasses only novel specific representational identifiers.