Applying Text Mining to Analyze Human Question Asking in Creativity Research

Creativity relates to the ability to generate novel, and effective, ideas in the areas of interest. How are such creative ideas generated? One possible mechanism that supports creative ideation, and is gaining increased empirical attention, is by asking questions. Question asking is a likely cognitive mechanism that allows defining problems, facilitating creative problem solving [15]. However, much is unknown about the exact role of questions in creativity. This work presents an attempt to apply text mining methods to measure the cognitive potential of questions, taking into account, among others, (a) question type, (b) question complexity, and (c) content of the answer. This contribution summarizes the history of question mining as a part of creativity research, along with the natural language processing methods deemed useful, or helpful, in the study. Furthermore, a novel approach is proposed, implemented, and applied to five datasets. Obtained experimental results are comprehensively analyzed, suggesting that natural language processing has a role to play in the creativity research.