Text and Dynamic Network Analysis for Measuring Technological Convergence: A Case Study on Defense Patent Data

Identifying technology convergence is getting harder, especially in fast-evolving and cross-technological fields. On the other side, natural language processing and network analysis researchers is to provide a novel method for mapping technologies and their relations over time, in order to identify dynamic patterns of convergence and to test it on the C4ISTAR field, a defense-related cross-technological field. The methodology automatically extracts technologies from a corpus of scientific papers, policy documents, websites, and company reports using Named Entity Recognition approaches. These technologies are then retrieved from the second corpus of more than 300 thousand patents related to the C4ISTAR domain, measuring their cooccurrences over time. Finally, using the time-varying network analysis, we were able to identify and measure the pattern of technological convergence.