Discovering a representative set of theme patterns from a large amount of text for interpreting their meaning has always been concerned by researches of both data mining and information retrieval. Recent studies of theme pattern mining have paid close attention to the problem of discovering a set of compatible top-k theme patterns with both high-interestingness and lowredundancy. Since different users have different preferences on interestingness and redundancy, how to measure the attributes of the users’ preferences, and thereby to discover “preferred compatible top-k theme patterns” (PCTTP) is urgent in the field of text mining. In this paper, a novel strategy of discovering PCTTP based on users’ preferences in text mining is proposed. Firstly, an evaluation function of the preferred compatibility between every two theme patterns is presented. Then the preferred compatibilities are archived into a data structure called theme compatibility graph, and a problem called MWSP base...