Towards explanation of scientific and technological emergence

Analysts who are interested in quickly identifying new and emerging scientific advancements have numerous challenges as the breadth, depth, and volume of scientific literature increases. Network analysis and mining is key to the success in this task. The ARBITER system seeks to identify indicators of emergence and provide a system that is capable of analyzing corpora of full text and metadata to identify emerging science topics and explain its reasoning and conclusions. In this paper, we describe a network-modeling framework that is used in the ARBITER system, and describe our novel hybrid approach using probabilistic foundations in combination with semantic technology and introduce our explanation infrastructure. We include a discussion of some challenges and opportunities related to explaining hybrid approaches to indicator-based analysis and emergence detection.