Automatically Generating Scenarios from a Text Corpus: A Case Study on Electric Vehicles

Creating ‘what-if’ scenarios to estimate possible futures is a key component of decision-making processes. However, this activity is labor intensive as it is primarily done manually by subject-matter experts who start by identifying relevant themes and their interconnections to build models, and then craft diverse and meaningful stories as scenarios to run on these models. Previous works have shown that text mining could automate the model-building aspect, for example, by using topic modeling to extract themes from a large corpus and employing variations of association rule mining to connect them in quantitative ways. In this paper, we propose to further automate the process of scenario generation by guiding pre-trained deep neural networks (i.e., BERT) through simulated conversations to extract a model from a corpus. Our case study on electric vehicles shows that our approach yields similar results to previous work while almost eliminating the need for manual involvement in model building, thus focusing human expertise on the final stage of crafting compelling scenarios. Specifically, by using the same corpus as a previous study on electric vehicles, we show that the model created here either performs similarly to the previous study when there is a consensus in the literature, or differs by highlighting important gaps on domains such as government deregulation.