Forecasting Emerging Trends from Scientific Literature

Text analysis methods for the automatic identification of emerging technologies by analyzing the scientific publications, are gaining attention because of their socio-economic impact. The approaches so far have been mainly focused on retrospective analysis by mapping scientific topic evolution over time. We propose regression based approaches to predict future keyword distribution. The prediction is based on historical data of the keywords, which in our case, are LREC conference proceedings. Considering the insufficient number of data points available from LREC proceedings, we do not employ standard time series forecasting methods. We form a dataset by extracting the keywords from previous year proceedings and quantify their yearly relevance using tf-idf scores. This dataset additionally contains ranked lists of related keywords and experts for each keyword.