Analyzing the Issue Life Cycle by Mapping Inter-Period Issues

Recently, the number of social media users has increased rapidly because of the prevalence of smart devices. As a result, the amount of real-time data has been increasing exponentially, which, in turn, is generating more interest in using such data to create added value. For instance, several attempts are being made to analyze the relevant search keywords that are frequently used on new portal sites and the words that are regularly mentioned on various social media in order to identify social issues. The technique of "topic analysis" is employed in order to identify topics and themes from a large amount of text documents. As one of the most prevalent applications of topic analysis, the technique of issue tracking investigates changes in the social issues that are identified through topic analysis. Currently, traditional issue tracking is conducted by identifying the main topics of documents that cover an entire period at the same time and analyzing the occurrence of each topic by the period of occurrence. However, this traditional issue tracking approach has two limitations. First, when a new period is included, topic analysis must be repeated for all the documents of the entire period, rather than being conducted only on the new documents of the added period. This creates practical limitations in the form of significant time and cost burdens. Therefore, this traditional approach is difficult to apply in most applications that need to perform an analysis on the additional period. Second, the issue is not only generated and terminated constantly, but also one issue can sometimes be distributed into several issues or multiple issues can be integrated into one single issue. In other words, each issue is characterized by a life cycle that consists of the stages of creation, transition (merging and segmentation), and termination. The existing issue tracking methods do not address the connection and effect relationship between these issues. The purpose of this study is to overcome the two limitations of the existing issue tracking method, one being the limitation regarding the analysis method and the other being the limitation involving the lack of consideration of the changeability of the issues. Let us assume that we perform multiple topic analysis for each multiple period. Then it is essential to map issues of different periods in order to trace trend of issues. However, it is not easy to discover connection between issues of different periods because the issues derived for each period mutually contain heterogeneity. In this study, to overcome these limitations without having to analyze the entire period's documents simultaneously, the analysis can be performed independently for each period. In addition, we performed issue mapping to link the identified issues of each period. An integrated approach on each details period was presented, and the issue flow of the entire integrated period was depicted in this study. Thus, as the entire process of the issue life cycle, including the stages of creation, transition (merging and segmentation), and extinction, is identified and examined systematically, the changeability of the issues was analyzed in this study. The proposed methodology is highly efficient in terms of time and cost, as it sufficiently considered the changeability of the issues. Further, the results of this study can be used to adapt the methodology to a practical situation. By applying the proposed methodology to actual Internet news, the potential practical applications of the proposed methodology are analyzed. Consequently, the proposed methodology was able to extend the period of the analysis and it could follow the course of progress of each issue's life cycle. Further, this methodology can facilitate a clearer understanding of complex social phenomena using topic analysis.

기간별 이슈 매핑을 통한 이슈 생명주기 분석 방법론

최근 스마트 기기를 통해 소셜미디어에 참여하는 사용자가 급격히 증가하고 있다. 이에 따라 빅데이터 분석에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있으며 최근 포털 사이트에서 검색어로 자주 입력되거나 다양한 소셜미디어에서 자주 언급되는 단어에 대한 분석을 통해 사회적 이슈를 파악하기 위한 시도가 이루어 지고 있다. 이처럼 다량의 텍스트를 통해 도출된 사회적 이슈의 기간별 추이를 비교하는 분석을 이슈 트래킹이라 한다. 하지만 기존의 이슈 트래킹은 두 가지 한계를 가지고 있다. 첫째, 전통적 방식의 이슈 트래킹은 전체 기간의 문서에 대해 일괄 토픽 분석을 실시하고 각 토픽의 기간별 분포를 파악하는 방식으로 이루어지므로, 새로운 기간의 문서가 추가되었을 때 추가된 문서에 대해서만 분석을 추가 실시하는 것이 아니라 전체 기간의 문서에 대한 분석을 다시 실시해야 한다는 실용성 측면의 한계를 갖고 있다. 둘째, 이슈는 끊임 없이 생성되고 소멸될 뿐 아니라, 때로는 하나의 이슈가 둘 이상의 이슈로 분화하고 둘 이상의 이슈가 하나로 통합되기도 한다. 즉, 이슈는 생성, 변화(병합, 분화), 그리고 소멸의 생명주기를 갖게 되는데, 전통적 이슈 트래킹은 이러한 이슈의 가변성을 다루지 않았다는 한계를 갖는다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 한계를 극복하기 위해 대상 기간 전체의 문서를 한꺼번에 분석하는 방식이 아닌 세부 기간별 문서에 대해 독립적인 분석을 수행하고 이를 통합할 수 있는 방안을 제시하였으며, 이를 통해 새로운 이슈가 생성되고 변화하며 소멸되는 전체 과정을 규명하였다. 또한 실제 인터넷 뉴스에 대해 제안 방법론을 적용함으로써, 제안 방법론의 실무 적용 가능성을 분석하였다.