How Does Meaning Extraction Work?

Northern Light's David Seuss writes a piece about meaning extraction:

Meaning extraction.What exactly is that, you ask?  Other than a catch phrase, one of those one of those unique combinations of words that marketing folks crave to have associated with their brand.I submit this definition of “meaning extraction” for your consideration:
Meaning extraction is an emerging technology that identifies elements of information and concepts contained within documents and document repositories, and surfaces combinations of these informative elements and concepts that imply meaning in the context of the business, professional, or technical purpose of the search process.  Meaning extraction applied to search applications dramatically improves and accelerates a searcher’s ability to gain insight into a topic and answer specific research questions.
Since the above has a theoretical tone that drains all the flash and boom from the concept, I thought it might be useful to provide a real-world example from the pharmaceutical industry.   But as the private meaning extraction applications Northern Light operates for its clients cannot be viewed by anyone but our clients, I will illustrate meaning extraction using a database of research documents that is publicly available. 

He then goes on to do use PubMed for an in-depth illustration.