Towards computational assessment of idea novelty

In crowdsourcing ideation websites, companies can easily collect large amount of ideas. Screening through such volume of ideas is very costly and challenging, necessitating automatic approaches. It would be particularly useful to automatically evaluate idea novelty since companies commonly seek novel ideas. Three computational approaches were tested, based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), respectively. These three approaches were used on three set of ideas and the computed idea novelty was compared with human expert evaluation. TF-IDF based measure correlated better with expert evaluation than the other two measures. However, our results show that these approaches do not match human judgement well enough to replace it.