Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and non-transitory computer-readable storage media for performing trend analysis of speech. A system practicing the method receives a speech trend analysis request having candidate feature constraints, an objective function with respect to a speech trend to be analyzed, and a set of speech record constraints. The system selects a subset of speech records from the group of speech records based on the set of speech record constraints to yield selected speech records, identifies features in the selected speech records based on the set of candidate feature constraints to yield identified features, and assigns a weight to each of the identified features based on the objective function. Then the system ranks the identified features by their respective weights to yield ranked identified features, and outputs at least one of the ranked identified features associated with a speech-based trend in response to the speech trend analysis request.