In order to extract meaningful phrases from corpora (e. g. in an information retrieval context) intensive knowledge of the domain in question and the respective documents is generally needed. When moving to a new domain or language the underlying knowledge bases and models need to be adapted, which is often time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper adresses the described challenge of phrase extraction from documents in different domains and languages and proposes an approach, which does not use comprehensive lexica and therefore can be easily transferred to new domains and languages. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on user generated content and documents from the patent domain in English and German.