A Scalable and Automated Framework for Tracking the Likely Adoption of Emerging Technologies

Abstract

While new technologies are expected to revolutionise and become game-changers in improving the efficiency and practices of our daily lives, it is also critical to investigate and understand the barriers and opportunities faced by their adopters. Such findings can serve as an additional feature in the decisionmaking process when analysing the risks, costs, and benefits of adopting an emerging technology in a particular setting. Although several studies have attempted to perform such investigations, these approaches adopt a qualitative data collection methodology, which is limited in terms of the size of the targeted participant group and is associated with a significant manual overhead when transcribing and inferring results. This paper presents a scalable and automated framework for tracking the likely adoption and/or rejection of new technologies from a large landscape of adopters. In particular, a large corpus of social media texts containing references to emerging technologies was compiled. Text mining techniques were applied to extract the sentiments expressed towards technology aspects. In the context of the problem definition herein, we hypothesise that the expression of positive sentiment implies an increase in the likelihood of impacting a technology user’s acceptance to adopt, integrate, and/or use the technology, and negative sentiment implies an increase in the likelihood of impacting the rejection of emerging technologies by adopters. To quantitatively test our hypothesis, a ground truth analysis was performed to validate that the sentiments captured by the text mining approach were comparable to the results provided by human annotators when asked to label whether such texts positively or negatively impact their outlook towards adopting an emerging technology. The collected annotations demonstrated comparable results to those of the text mining approach, illustrating that the automatically extracted sentiments expressed towards technologies are useful features in understanding the landscape faced by technology adopters, as well as serving as an important decisionmaking component when, for example, recognising shifts in user behaviours, new demands, and emerging uncertainties.