Revealing New Technologies in Ocean Engineering Research using Machine Learning

Abstract

On par with aerospace engineering, ocean engineering has caught a lot of attention re-cently. In this paper we employ machine learning and natural language processing methods to reveal new technologies and research hotspots in the ocean engineering field. Our data collection includes 14 high-impact journals, and the abstracts of almost 30,000 papers pub- lished from 2010 to 2019. We employed two topic models, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and PhraseLDA. Used independently, the LDA model may lack interpretability and the PhraseLDA result may lose information in the final topics. We hence combined these two models and discovered the research hotspots for each year using affinity propagation cluster- ing and word-cloud-based visualization. The results reveal that several topics such as "wind power" and "ship structure", areas such as the European and Arctic seas, and some common research methods are increasing in popularity. This work consists of data collection, topic modelling, clustering, and visualization, which can help researchers understand the trends and important topics in ocean engineering as well as other fields.