Flexible creation of indicators of scientific and technological emergence: Emerging phenomena and big data

This paper describes ARBITER, a system for characterizing scientific and technological fields and detecting emergent fields. ARBITER processes large collections of technoscientific publications and patents to extract full-text and metadata features relevant to rich characterizations of emergent fields. The paper describes how ARBITER uses these indicators in a flexible manner to infer a wide variety of patterns of interest using customizable models that capture the user's understanding of what is important in emergence.