Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for identifying document topics. A system configured to practice the method receives a document from a corpus of documents, learns interpersonal relationships of users associated with the document, performs a lexical analysis of the document, and, based on the interpersonal relationships of the users and the lexical analysis, identifying a topic for the document. The approaches disclosed herein can integrate user-people relationships to identify topics for documents with low lexical or high contextual content. The system can learn this user-people relationship from context. The system uses this learned behavior to identify communication documents correctly. Another aspect is the separation of the two phases. The system overlays the learned model on the lexical topic analysis, allowing the system to capture user-defined topics and user behavior that is learned from other factors such as medium (calls, events, etc) or user preferences.