Hyperspherical Semantic Trajectory Analysis: Mapping Technological Diffusion across Academic Preprints, Patent Signals, and Compute Scaling

Muhammad Sukri Bin Ramli

cs.CLSep 25, 2026

Hyperspherical Semantic Trajectory Analysis: Mapping Technological Diffusion across Academic Preprints, Patent Signals, and Compute Scaling

Authors: Muhammad Sukri Bin Ramli

Organizations: Asia School of Business, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract

Macroeconomic productivity metrics, such as Total Factor Productivity, register technological breakthroughs with multi-year reporting lags due to administrative survey intervals and national accounting conventions. This paper introduces Hyperspherical Semantic Trajectory Analysis (HSTA), an unsupervised quantitative methodology that tracks technology diffusion directly from unstructured scientific and commercial text streams. We analyze 30,000 filtered document records spanning academic preprints from arXiv and patent application records from the USPTO. By projecting high-dimensional Transformer sentence embeddings onto unit hyperspheres using Spherical K-Means clustering across eight primary sub-topics and UMAP manifold reductions, HSTA formalizes two quantitative metrics: (1) Semantic Centroid Vector Drift, which tracks vocabulary shifts between temporal sub-corpora to identify structural paradigm transformations; and (2) Commercialization Offset, which evaluates cross-corpus peak density alignments between scientific discovery and intellectual property filings. Linking quarterly topic volume velocity with physical hardware metrics from the Epoch AI database, Vector Autoregressive F-tests demonstrate that quarterly paper volume velocity alone does not Granger-cause frontier compute allocation surges at conventional statistical significance levels, highlighting the necessity of conditioning textual signals on physical capital constraints. Empirical results reveal that sub-topics covering Large Language Models (with a drift metric of 0.332) and Artificial Intelligence Systems (with a drift metric of 0.234) undergo the highest rate of semantic evolution, offering an objective, real-time mechanism to complement traditional economic statistics.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: High-Density UMAP Semantic Manifold ( $N=30,000$ documents). The projection illustrates topological separation between academic preprints (arXiv, left region) and commercial patent filings (USPTO, right region) across eight Spherical $K$ -Means clusters.

Figure 2: Document Volume Distribution Across Discovered Sub-Topics (2016–2026). Stacked bars display publication density across years. The 2026 volume expansion reflects dataset index bounds in primary streaming sources.

Figure 3: Physical Constraint Metric: Epoch AI Training Compute Trajectory (FLOPs). Scatter plot displaying exponential compute scaling across landmark AI models on a logarithmic scale (2016–2026).

Figure 4: Semantic Centroid Vector Drift ( $\Delta_{k}=1-\cos\theta$ ). Bar heights quantify internal vocabulary and conceptual shifts between early and late temporal sub-corpora.

Figure 5: Commercialization Offset ( $\tau_{k}$ in Quarters). Bars illustrate cross-corpus density alignments between academic paper peaks and patent filing peaks.

Figure 6: Granger Causality $F$ -Test $p$ -Values. Bars display $p$ -values testing whether quarterly paper volume velocity predicts compute allocation spikes relative to $\alpha=0.05$ .

ID	Assigned Technical Domain	Count ( $N$ )	Share (%)	Silhouette ( $S_{i}$ )	Drift ( $\Delta_{k}$ )
C0	Device & Hardware Architecture	3,412	11.37%	0.312	0.015
C1	Foundational Model Design	4,210	14.03%	0.355	0.174
C2	Artificial Intelligence Systems	3,890	12.97%	0.368	0.234
C3	Statistical Machine Learning	3,105	10.35%	0.298	0.012
C4	Neural Network Layers	3,650	12.17%	0.330	0.138
C5	Computer Vision & Imaging	3,820	12.73%	0.361	0.234

Table 1: Cluster Domain Mapping, Document Counts, and Semantic Drift Metrics

Cluster ID	Assigned Technical Domain	Offset $\tau_{k}$ (Qtrs)	Granger $F$ -Stat	Granger $p$ -Value
C0	Device & Hardware Architecture	-31	0.412	0.68
C1	Foundational Model Design	-13	1.284	0.28
C2	Artificial Intelligence Systems	-22	0.275	0.76
C3	Statistical Machine Learning	-10	1.114	0.33
C4	Neural Network Layers	-32	0.801	0.45
C5	Computer Vision & Imaging	-19	0.618	0.54

Table 2: Econometric Metrics: Commercialization Offset and Granger Predictability Tests

Appendix figures & tables1 asset

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Cluster Count ( $K$ )	Mean Silhouette Score ( $S$ )	Davies-Bouldin Index ( $DB$ )
$K=4$	0.261	1.54
$K=6$	0.308	1.31
$K=8$	0.342	1.18
$K=10$	0.315	1.27
$K=12$	0.289	1.39

Appendix

Table 3: Hyperparameter Validation Across Candidate Cluster Counts (

K

)

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Semantic change detection identifies how meanings, concepts, or scene contents differ across time in text, images, and other data.

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Forecasting transformative technologies remains a critical but challenging task, particularly in fast-evolving domains such as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Traditional expert-based methods struggle to keep pace with short innovation cycles and ambiguous early-stage terminology. In this work, we propose a novel, data-driven pipeline to monitor the emergence of transformative technologies by identifying patterns of technological convergence. Our approach leverages advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract semantic triples from unstructured text and construct a large-scale graph of technology-related entities and relations. We introduce a new method for grouping semantically similar technology terms (noun stapling) and develop graph-based metrics to detect convergence signals. The pipeline includes multi-stage filtering, domain-specific keyword clustering, and a temporal trend analysis of topic co-occurence. We validate our methodology on two complementary datasets: 278,625 arXiv preprints (2017--2024) to capture early scientific signals, and 9,793 USPTO patent applications (2018-2024) to track downstream commercial developments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can identify both established and emerging convergence patterns, offering a scalable and generalizable framework for technology forecasting grounded in full-text analysis.

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