Technology Hotspot Tracking: Topic Discovery and Evolution of China’s Blockchain Patents Based on a Dynamic LDA Model

Abstract

Tracking scientific and technological (S&T) research hotspots can help scholars to grasp the status of current research and develop regular patterns in the field over time. It contributes to the generation of new ideas and plays an important role in promoting the writing of scientific research projects and scientific papers. Patents are important S&T resources, which can reflect the development status of the field. In this paper, we use topic modeling, topic intensity, and evolutionary computing models to discover research hotspots and development trends in the field of blockchain patents. First, we propose a time-based dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation (TDLDA) modeling method based on a probabilistic graph model and knowledge representation learning for patent text mining. Second, we present a computational model, topic intensity (TI), that expresses the topic strength and evolution. Finally, the point-wise mutual information (PMI) value is used to evaluate topic quality. We obtain 20 hot topics through TDLDA experiments and rank them according to the strength calculation model. The topic evolution model is used to analyze the topic evolution trend from the perspectives of rising, falling, and stable. From the experiments we found that 8 topics showed an upward trend, 6 topics showed a downward trend, and 6 topics became stable or fluctuated. Compared with the baseline method, TDLDA can have the best effect when K is 40 or less. TDLDA is an effective topic model that can extract hot topics and evolution trends of blockchain patent texts, which helps researchers to more accurately grasp the research direction and improves the quality of project application and paper writing in the blockchain technology domain.