A Text Mining Framework for Discovering Technological Intelligence to Support Science and Technology Management

Science and Technology (S and T) information presents a rich resource, essential for managing research and development (R and D) programs. Management of R and D has long been a labor-intensive process, relying extensively on the accumulated knowledge of experts within the organization. Furthermore, the rapid pace of S and T growth has increased the complexity of R and D management significantly. Fortunately, the parallel growth of information and of analytical tools offers the promise of advanced decision aids to support R and D management more effectively. Information retrieval, data mining and other information-based technologies are receiving increased attention. In this thesis, a framework based on text mining techniques is proposed to discover useful intelligence implicit in large bodies of electronic text sources. This intelligence is a prime requirement for successful R and D management. This research extends the approach called Technology Opportunities Analysis (developed by the Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, in conjunction with Search Technology, Inc.) to create the proposed framework. The commercialized software, called VantagePoint, is mainly used to perform basic analyses. In addition to utilizing functions in VantagePoint, this thesis also implements a novel text association rule mining algorithm for gathering related concepts among text data. Two algorithms based on text association rule mining are also implemented. The first algorithm called tree-structured networks is used to capture important aspects of both parent-child (hierarchical structure) and sibling relations (non-hierarchical structure) among related terms. The second algorithm called concept-grouping is used to construct term thesauri for data preprocessing. Finally, the framework is applied to Thai S and T publication abstracts toward the objective of improving R and D management. The results of the study can help support strategic decision-making on the direction of S and T programs in Thailand.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Porter, Alan; Committee Member: Cozzens, Susan; Committee Member: Huo, Xiaoming; Committee Member: Lu, Jye-Chyi; Committee Member: Zhu, Donghu