Knowledge-based extraction of intellectual capital-related information from unstructured data

• A Knowledge-based Intellectual Capital Extraction (KBICE) algorithm is presented.
• It incorporates computational linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
• It aims at automatic extraction of IC-related information from unstructured data.
• The performance was evaluated by using financial reports from the banking industry.

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for the identification of an organization’s intellectual capital (IC) for decision support and providing important managerial insights in knowledge-intensive industries. In traditional approaches, identification of an organization’s IC is usually done manually through interviews, surveys, workshops, etc. These methods are labor and time intensive and the quality of the results is highly dependent on, among other things, the experience of the investigators. This paper presents a Knowledge-based Intellectual Capital Extraction (KBICE) algorithm which incorporates the technologies of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI) for automatic processing of unstructured data and extraction of important IC-related information. The performance of KBICE was assessed through a series of experiments conducted by using publicly available financial reports from the banking industry as the testing batch and encouraging results have been obtained. The results showed that, through the use of hybrid intelligent matching strategies, it is possible to extract commonly referred IC-related information from unstructured data automatically. IC information analyst can rely on this method as an additional mean to identify and extract the commonly sought IC information from financial reports in a fast, systematic and reliable manner.