The disclosure is related to mining of text to derive information from the text that is useful for a variety of purposes. The text mining process can be implemented in a service oriented industry such as a call center, where a customer and an agent engage in a dialog, e.g., to discuss product/service related issues. The messages in dialogues between the customers and the agents are tagged with features that describe an aspect of the conversation. The text mining process can mine various dialogues and identify a set of features and messages based on prediction algorithms. The identified set of features and messages can be used to infer an intent of a particular customer for contacting the agent, and to generate a recommendation based on the determined intent.