What Are They Talking about? Relation Extraction from News to Identify Research Directions in Emerging Technologies

Abstract

Emerging technologies are characterized by their uncertainty, rapid evolution, and major impact. We focus on identifying research directions in these technologies. Identifying these research directions requires keeping in pace with the development of the technologies, and reaching out to individuals and society, beyond organizations. This is made possible by big data analytics. This paper uses design science research to propose and apply a methodology that performs text mining on news crawled from the Internet to identify research directions for an emerging technology. The methodology uses relation extraction on the news documents to extract relations between terms of the emerging technology and information systems constructs. These relations are then analyzed to suggest research avenues. We apply the methodology to blockchain, a major emerging technology, and derive insights from this application.