Title: Accelerating Innovation Through Analogy Mining,
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.