Web mining based extraction of problem solution ideas

The internet is a valuable source of information where many ideas can be found dealing with different topics. A few numbers of ideas might be able to solve an existing problem. However, it is time-consuming to identify these ideas within the large amount of textual information in the internet. This paper introduces a new web mining approach that enables an automated identification of new technological ideas extracted from internet sources that are able to solve a given problem. It adapts and combines several existing approaches from literature: approaches that extract new technological ideas from a user given text, approaches that investigate the different idea characteristics in different technical domains, and multi-language web mining approaches. In contrast to previous work, the proposed approach enables the identification of problem solution ideas in the internet considering domain dependencies and language aspects. In a case study, new ideas are identified to solve existing technological problems as occurred in research and development (R&D) projects. This supports the process of research planning and technology development. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.