Innovation, Language, and the Web

Language and innovation are inseparable. Language conveys ideas which are essential in corporate innovation; innovation would be nearly impossible if we did not have language. Language establishes the most immediate connections with our conceptualisation of the outside world, and it provides the building blocks for communication. The structure of language itself reflects its functional and communicative use. Communication takes place when there is a real information exchange process. Every linguistic choice is necessarily meaningful, and absolute variables involve the parallel construction of form and meaning. From this perspective, language is not only structure, but a dynamic knowledge construction process as well. Knowledge transfer and innovation transfer are ubiquitous processes: knowledge extraction requires heterogeneous tasks related to the acquisition, from unstructured textual data in digital format, of structured and classified information relating to research topics. In the full version of this approach, emphasis will be laid on the mechanisms underlying language processing and communicative interaction, outlining knowledge retention and retrieval processes. The spread of Internet has enabled development of better bibliographic scientific databases with significantly improved capacity for storage and retrieval. In recent years, web searching has become the default mode of highly innovative information retrieval, though the main sources of digital information are unstructured or semi-structured documents. Information relating to developments in scientific research is collected in the form of abstracts or full publications, in large and growing bibliographic repositories. Considering the web as a corpus makes it possible to investigate how words are used to describe innovation, and how innovation topics can influence word usage and collocational behaviour. Investigation of corpora is concerned with the description of use and structure of language, by inquiring linguistic phenomena such as, co-occurence distributions, collocational variability, derivational productivity, neologism coinage. This will bring into focus the dynamic interplay between lexical creativity and innovative pragmatic contexts, thus blurring the traditional dichotomy between knowledge of language and its use. In particular, the work will focus on how words and language structures become vehicle for knowledge generation and innovation transfer, and how research data, research results and widely-distributed dissemination papers can support and enhance future research.