Identifying the Development Trends of Emerging Technologies: A Social Awareness Analysis Method using Web News Data Mining

Identifying the development trends of emerging technologies with disruptive potential as early as possible is crucial for enterprise research and development (R&D) investment planning and government R&D strategic planning. To avoid the weakness of using scientific papers or patents to study the development trends of emerging technologies, this paper proposes a research framework to identify the development trends of emerging technologies based on social awareness analysis. First, we apply the Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes (HDP) topic model to study the changing patterns of social publics' topics concerning emerging technologies. Second, we use an improved sentiment analysis method to analyze the changing pattern of social publics' expectations and emotions toward emerging technologies over time. Next, we identify the development trends of emerging technologies based on the social awareness analysis. Finally, the perovskite solar cells technology is given as a case study to analyze the effectiveness and feasibility of the research framework.