Accelerating innovation through analogy mining

Tom Hope, Joel Chan, Aniket Kittur, Dafna Shahaf

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

60 Scopus citations

Abstract

The availability of large idea repositories (e.g., the U.S. patent database) could significantly accelerate innovation and discovery by providing people with inspiration from solutions to analogous problems. However, finding useful analogies in these large, messy, real-world repositories remains a persistent challenge for either human or automated methods. Previous approaches include costly hand-created databases that have high relational structure (e.g., predicate calculus representations) but are very sparse. Simpler machine-learning/information-retrieval similarity metrics can scale to large, natural-language datasets, but struggle to account for structural similarity, which is central to analogy. In this paper we explore the viability and value of learning simpler structural representations, specifically, "problem schemas", which specify the purpose of a product and the mechanisms by which it achieves that purpose. Our approach combines crowdsourcing and recurrent neural networks to extract purpose and mechanism vector representations from product descriptions. We demonstrate that these learned vectors allow us to find analogies with higher precision and recall than traditional information-retrieval methods. In an ideation experiment, analogies retrieved by our models significantly increased people's likelihood of generating creative ideas compared to analogies retrieved by traditional methods. Our results suggest a promising approach to enabling computational analogy at scale is to learn and leverage weaker structural representations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationKDD 2017 - Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages235-243
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450348874
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 Aug 2017
Event23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2017 - Halifax, Canada
Duration: 13 Aug 201717 Aug 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
VolumePart F129685

Conference

Conference23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2017
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityHalifax
Period13/08/1717/08/17

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.

Keywords

  • Computational analogy
  • Creativity
  • Innovation
  • Product dimensions
  • Text embedding
  • Text mining

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