Finding new technological ideas and inventions with text mining and technique philosophy

Text mining refers generally to the process of deriving high quality information from unstructured texts. Unstructured texts come in many shapes and sizes. It may be stored in research papers, articles in technical periodicals, reports, documents, web pages etc. Here we introduce a new approach for finding textual patterns representing new technological ideas and inventions in unstructured technological texts. This text mining approach follows the statements of technique philosophy. Therefore a technological idea or invention represents not only a new mean, but a new purpose and mean combination. By systematic identification of the purposes, means and purpose-mean combinations in unstructured technological texts compared to specialized reference collections, a (semi-) automatic finding of ideas and inventions can be realized. Characteristics that are used to measure the quality of these patterns found in technological texts are comprehensibility and novelty to humans and usefulness for an application.