Can Text Analysis Tell Us Something About Technology Progress?

A corpus -based diachronic analysis of patent documents, based mainly on the morphologically productive use of certain terms can help in tracking the evolution of key developments in a rapidly e volving specialist field. The patent texts were o btained from the US Patent & Trade Marks Office’s on-line service and the terms were extracted automatically from the texts. The chosen specialist field was that of fast-switching devices and systems. The method presented draws from liter ature on biblio and sciento -metrics, information extraction, corpus linguistics, and on aspects of English morphology. This interdisciplinary fram ework shows that the evolution of word -formation closely shadows the developments in a field of technology.