Extraction and visualization of technical trend information from research papers and patents

To a researcher in a field with high industrial relevance, retrieving and analyzing research papers and patents are important aspects of assessing the scope of the field. Knowledge of the history and effects of the elemental technologies is important for understanding trends. We propose a method for automatically creating a technical trend map from both research papers and patents by focusing on the elemental (underlying) technologies and their effects. We constructed a method that can be used in any research field. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted an experiment using the data in the NTCIR-8 Workshop Patent Mining Task. The results of our experiment showed recall and precision scores of 0.254 and 0.496, respectively, for the analysis of research papers, and recall and precision scores of 0.455 and 0.507, respectively, for the analysis of patents. Those results indicate that our method for mapping technical trends is both useful and sound.