Mining Suppliers from Online News Documents.

Supplier intelligence represents an important type of competitive intelligence essential to organizational strategic planning and analysis, because the moves that the suppliers of a firm make will affect the business network’s health, which in turn will impact the performance of the firm. Central to supplier intelligence is to identify who the suppliers of a focal firm and its competitors are. Thus, an effective supplier mining technique that automatically identifies and discovers the suppliers of a firm and its competitors from publicly available information sources (news documents in this study) is desperately needed. In this study, we exploit text and link mining techniques to construct a supplier relationship mining (SRM) system to automatically discover supplier relationships concerning a focal company from online business news documents. Our empirical evaluation result suggests that our proposed SRM system outperforms its benchmark method in precision and recall.