Analysis of News Agenda Using Text mining and Semantic Network Analysis: Focused on COVID-19 Emotions

The global spread of COVID-19 around the world has not only affected many parts of our daily life but also has a huge impact on many areas, including the economy and society. As the number of confirmed cases and deaths increases, medical staff and the public are said to be experiencing psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and stress. The collective tragedy that accompanies the epidemic raises fear and anxiety, which is known to cause enormous disruptions to the behavior and psychological well-being of many. Long-term negative emotions can reduce people's immunity and destroy their physical balance, so it is essential to understand the psychological state of COVID-19. This study suggests a method of monitoring medial news reflecting current days which requires striving not only for physical but also for psychological quarantine in the prolonged COVID-19 situation. Moreover, it is presented how an easier method of analyzing social media networks applies to those cases. The aim of this study is to assist health policymakers in fast and complex decision-making processes. News plays a major role in setting the policy agenda. Among various major media, news headlines are considered important in the field of communication science as a summary of the core content that the media wants to convey to the audiences who read it. News data used in this study was easily collected using "Bigkinds" that is created by integrating big data technology. With the collected news data, keywords were classified through text mining, and the relationship between words was visualized through semantic network analysis between keywords. Using the KrKwic program, a Korean semantic network analysis tool, text mining was performed and the frequency of words was calculated to easily identify keywords. The frequency of words appearing in keywords of articles related to COVID-19 emotions was checked and visualized in word cloud 'China', 'anxiety', 'situation', 'mind', 'social', and 'health' appeared high in relation to the emotions of COVID-19. In addition, UCINET, a specialized social network analysis program, was used to analyze connection centrality and cluster analysis, and a method of visualizing a graph using Net Draw was performed. As a result of analyzing the connection centrality between each data, it was found that the most central keywords in the keyword-centric network were 'psychology', 'COVID-19', 'blue', and 'anxiety'. The network of frequency of co-occurrence among the keywords appearing in the headlines of the news was visualized as a graph. The thickness of the line on the graph is proportional to the frequency of co-occurrence, and if the frequency of two words appearing at the same time is high, it is indicated by a thick line. It can be seen that the 'COVID-blue' pair is displayed in the boldest, and the 'COVID-emotion' and 'COVID-anxiety' pairs are displayed with a relatively thick line. 'Blue' related to COVID-19 is a word that means depression, and it was confirmed that COVID-19 and depression are keywords that should be of interest now. The research methodology used in this study has the convenience of being able to quickly measure social phenomena and changes while reducing costs. In this study, by analyzing news headlines, we were able to identify people's feelings and perceptions on issues related to COVID-19 depression, and identify the main agendas to be analyzed by deriving important keywords. By presenting and visualizing the subject and important keywords related to the COVID-19 emotion at a time, medical policy managers will be able to be provided a variety of perspectives when identifying and researching the regarding phenomenon. It is expected that it can help to use it as basic data for support, treatment and service development for psychological quarantine issues related to COVID-19.

텍스트 마이닝과 의미 네트워크 분석을 활용한 뉴스 의제 분석: 코로나 19 관련 감정을 중심으로

전 세계적으로 퍼진 코로나 19 상황은 우리의 일상생활의 많은 부분에 영향을 끼쳤을 뿐만 아니라, 경제·사회 등 많은 부분에 걸쳐 막대한 영향력을 미치고 있다. 확진자와 사망자 수가 증가함에 따라 의료진과 대중은 불안, 우울, 스트레스 등 심리적인 문제를 겪고 있다고 한다. 장기적인 부정적인 감정은 사람들의 면역력을 감소시키고 신체적인 균형을 파괴할 수도 있으므로 코로나 19로 인한 심리적인 상태를 이해하는 것이 필수적인 상황이다. 본 연구에서는 코로나 19 감정과 관련된 뉴스 데이터를 수집하여, 텍스트 마이닝을 통해 키워드를 분류하고, 키워드 사이의 의미 네트워크 분석을 통해 단어들의 관계를 시각화하였다. 코로나 감정과 관련된 기사의 키워드에 나타난 단어들의 빈도수를 확인하고 이를 워드 클라우드로 분석하였다. 키워드 빈도 분석 결과 코로나 19 감정과 관련하여 '중국', '불안', '상황', '마음', '사회', '건강'과 같은 단어의 빈도가 높게 나타난 것을 확인할 수 있었다. 각 데이터 간 연결 중심성을 분석한 결과 키워드 중심성 네트워크에서 가장 중심적인 핵심어는 '심리'와 '코로나 19', '블루', '불안'이라는 단어가 높은 연결 중심성을 가지는 것을 확인할 수 있었다. 기사의 헤드라인에 나타난 주요 핵심어 사이의 동시 출현 빈도 네트워크를 그래프로 시각화한 결과, '코로나-블루' 쌍이 가장 굵게 표시되었고, '코로나-감정', '코로나-불안' 쌍이 비교적 굵은 선으로 표시된 것을 알 수 있었다. 코로나와 관련된 '블루'는 우울증을 의미하는 단어로, 코로나와 우울증은 이제 관심을 가져야 할 키워드임을 확인할 수 있었다. 본 연구에서는 장기화한 코로나 19 상황에서 신체적인 방역뿐만 아니라 심리적인 방역에도 힘써야 할 이 시기에 보건 정책담당자가 빠르고 복잡한 의사결정 과정에 도움이 되고자 미디어 뉴스를 모니터링 함으로써, 더욱더 쉬운 소셜 미디어 네트워크 분석 방법을 제시하고자 한다.