• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.1-23
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• 2013

To discover significant social issues such as unemployment, economy crisis, social welfare etc. that are urgent issues to be solved in a modern society, in the existing approach, researchers usually collect opinions from professional experts and scholars through either online or offline surveys. However, such a method does not seem to be effective from time to time. As usual, due to the problem of expense, a large number of survey replies are seldom gathered. In some cases, it is also hard to find out professional persons dealing with specific social issues. Thus, the sample set is often small and may have some bias. Furthermore, regarding a social issue, several experts may make totally different conclusions because each expert has his subjective point of view and different background. In this case, it is considerably hard to figure out what current social issues are and which social issues are really important. To surmount the shortcomings of the current approach, in this paper, we develop a prototype system that semi-automatically detects social issue keywords representing social issues and problems from about 1.3 million news articles issued by about 10 major domestic presses in Korea from June 2009 until July 2012. Our proposed system consists of (1) collecting and extracting texts from the collected news articles, (2) identifying only news articles related to social issues, (3) analyzing the lexical items of Korean sentences, (4) finding a set of topics regarding social keywords over time based on probabilistic topic modeling, (5) matching relevant paragraphs to a given topic, and (6) visualizing social keywords for easy understanding. In particular, we propose a novel matching algorithm relying on generative models. The goal of our proposed matching algorithm is to best match paragraphs to each topic. Technically, using a topic model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we can obtain a set of topics, each of which has relevant terms and their probability values. In our problem, given a set of text documents (e.g., news articles), LDA shows a set of topic clusters, and then each topic cluster is labeled by human annotators, where each topic label stands for a social keyword. For example, suppose there is a topic (e.g., Topic1 = {(unemployment, 0.4), (layoff, 0.3), (business, 0.3)}) and then a human annotator labels "Unemployment Problem" on Topic1. In this example, it is non-trivial to understand what happened to the unemployment problem in our society. In other words, taking a look at only social keywords, we have no idea of the detailed events occurring in our society. To tackle this matter, we develop the matching algorithm that computes the probability value of a paragraph given a topic, relying on (i) topic terms and (ii) their probability values. For instance, given a set of text documents, we segment each text document to paragraphs. In the meantime, using LDA, we can extract a set of topics from the text documents. Based on our matching process, each paragraph is assigned to a topic, indicating that the paragraph best matches the topic. Finally, each topic has several best matched paragraphs. Furthermore, assuming there are a topic (e.g., Unemployment Problem) and the best matched paragraph (e.g., Up to 300 workers lost their jobs in XXX company at Seoul). In this case, we can grasp the detailed information of the social keyword such as "300 workers", "unemployment", "XXX company", and "Seoul". In addition, our system visualizes social keywords over time. Therefore, through our matching process and keyword visualization, most researchers will be able to detect social issues easily and quickly. Through this prototype system, we have detected various social issues appearing in our society and also showed effectiveness of our proposed methods according to our experimental results. Note that you can also use our proof-of-concept system in http://dslab.snu.ac.kr/demo.html.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.137-152
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• 2012

In the generation of Web 2.0, as many users start to make lots of web contents called user created contents by themselves, the World Wide Web is overflowing by countless information. Therefore, it becomes the key to find out meaningful information among lots of resources. Nowadays, the information retrieval is the most important thing throughout the whole field and several types of search services are developed and widely used in various fields to retrieve information that user really wants. Especially, the legal information search is one of the indispensable services in order to provide people with their convenience through searching the law necessary to their present situation as a channel getting knowledge about it. The Office of Legislation in Korea provides the Korean Law Information portal service to search the law information such as legislation, administrative rule, and judicial precedent from 2009, so people can conveniently find information related to the law. However, this service has limitation because the recent technology for search engine basically returns documents depending on whether the query is included in it or not as a search result. Therefore, it is really difficult to retrieve information related the law for general users who are not familiar with legal terms in the search engine using simple matching of keywords in spite of those kinds of efforts of the Office of Legislation in Korea, because there is a huge divergence between everyday words and legal terms which are especially from Chinese words. Generally, people try to access the law information using everyday words, so they have a difficulty to get the result that they exactly want. In this paper, we propose a term mapping methodology between everyday words and legal terms for general users who don't have sufficient background about legal terms, and we develop a search service that can provide the search results of law information from everyday words. This will be able to search the law information accurately without the knowledge of legal terminology. In other words, our research goal is to make a law information search system that general users are able to retrieval the law information with everyday words. First, this paper takes advantage of tags of internet blogs using the concept for collective intelligence to find out the term mapping relationship between everyday words and legal terms. In order to achieve our goal, we collect tags related to an everyday word from web blog posts. Generally, people add a non-hierarchical keyword or term like a synonym, especially called tag, in order to describe, classify, and manage their posts when they make any post in the internet blog. Second, the collected tags are clustered through the cluster analysis method, K-means. Then, we find a mapping relationship between an everyday word and a legal term using our estimation measure to select the fittest one that can match with an everyday word. Selected legal terms are given the definite relationship, and the relations between everyday words and legal terms are described using SKOS that is an ontology to describe the knowledge related to thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, and subject-heading. Thus, based on proposed mapping and searching methodologies, our legal information search system finds out a legal term mapped with user query and retrieves law information using a matched legal term, if users try to retrieve law information using an everyday word. Therefore, from our research, users can get exact results even if they do not have the knowledge related to legal terms. As a result of our research, we expect that general users who don't have professional legal background can conveniently and efficiently retrieve the legal information using everyday words.