• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.141-156
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• 2013

Social media is a representative form of the Web 2.0 that shapes the change of a user's information behavior by allowing users to produce their own contents without any expert skills. In particular, as a new communication medium, it has a profound impact on the social change by enabling users to communicate with the masses and acquaintances their opinions and thoughts. Social media data plays a significant role in an emerging Big Data arena. A variety of research areas such as social network analysis, opinion mining, and so on, therefore, have paid attention to discover meaningful information from vast amounts of data buried in social media. Social media has recently become main foci to the field of Information Retrieval and Text Mining because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real-time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading. But most of the previous studies have adopted broad-brush and limited approaches. These approaches have made it difficult to find and analyze new information. To overcome these limitations, we developed a real-time Twitter trend mining system to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers the functions of term co-occurrence retrieval, visualization of Twitter users by query, similarity calculation between two users, topic modeling to keep track of changes of topical trend, and mention-based user network analysis. In addition, we conducted a case study on the 2012 Korean presidential election. We collected 1,737,969 tweets which contain candidates' name and election on Twitter in Korea (http://www.twitter.com/) for one month in 2012 (October 1 to October 31). The case study shows that the system provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively. The system also retrieves the list of terms co-occurred by given query terms. We compare the results of term co-occurrence retrieval by giving influential candidates' name, 'Geun Hae Park', 'Jae In Moon', and 'Chul Su Ahn' as query terms. General terms which are related to presidential election such as 'Presidential Election', 'Proclamation in Support', Public opinion poll' appear frequently. Also the results show specific terms that differentiate each candidate's feature such as 'Park Jung Hee' and 'Yuk Young Su' from the query 'Guen Hae Park', 'a single candidacy agreement' and 'Time of voting extension' from the query 'Jae In Moon' and 'a single candidacy agreement' and 'down contract' from the query 'Chul Su Ahn'. Our system not only extracts 10 topics along with related terms but also shows topics' dynamic changes over time by employing the multinomial Latent Dirichlet Allocation technique. Each topic can show one of two types of patterns-Rising tendency and Falling tendencydepending on the change of the probability distribution. To determine the relationship between topic trends in Twitter and social issues in the real world, we compare topic trends with related news articles. We are able to identify that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. The user network in Twitter is different from those of other social media because of distinctive characteristics of making relationships in Twitter. Twitter users can make their relationships by exchanging mentions. We visualize and analyze mention based networks of 136,754 users. We put three candidates' name as query terms-Geun Hae Park', 'Jae In Moon', and 'Chul Su Ahn'. The results show that Twitter users mention all candidates' name regardless of their political tendencies. This case study discloses that Twitter could be an effective tool to detect and predict dynamic changes of social issues, and mention-based user networks could show different aspects of user behavior as a unique network that is uniquely found in Twitter.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.179-200
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• 2019

Word-of-mouth (WoM) is defined by consumer activities that share information concerning consumption. WoM activities have long been recognized as important in corporate marketing processes and have received much attention, especially in the marketing field. Recently, according to the development of the Internet, the way in which people exchange information in online news and online communities has been expanded, and WoM is diversified in terms of word of mouth, score, rating, and liking. Social media makes online users easy access to information and online WoM is considered a key source of information. Although various studies on WoM have been preceded by this phenomenon, there is no meta-analysis study that comprehensively analyzes them. This study proposed a method to extract major researches by applying text mining techniques and to grasp the main issues of researches in order to find the trend of WoM research using scholarly big data. To this end, a total of 4389 documents were collected by the keyword 'Word-of-mouth' from 1941 to 2018 in Scopus (www.scopus.com), a citation database, and the data were refined through preprocessing such as English morphological analysis, stopwords removal, and noun extraction. To carry out this study, we adopted main path analysis (MPA) and word co-occurrence network analysis. MPA detects key researches and is used to track the development trajectory of academic field, and presents the research trend from a macro perspective. For this, we constructed a citation network based on the collected data. The node means a document and the link means a citation relation in citation network. We then detected the key-route main path by applying SPC (Search Path Count) weights. As a result, the main path composed of 30 documents extracted from a citation network. The main path was able to confirm the change of the academic area which was developing along with the change of the times reflecting the industrial change such as various industrial groups. The results of MPA revealed that WoM research was distinguished by five periods: (1) establishment of aspects and critical elements of WoM, (2) relationship analysis between WoM variables, (3) beginning of researches of online WoM, (4) relationship analysis between WoM and purchase, and (5) broadening of topics. It was found that changes within the industry was reflected in the results such as online development and social media. Very recent studies showed that the topics and approaches related WoM were being diversified to circumstantial changes. However, the results showed that even though WoM was used in diverse fields, the main stream of the researches of WoM from the start to the end, was related to marketing and figuring out the influential factors that proliferate WoM. By applying word co-occurrence network analysis, the research trend is presented from a microscopic point of view. Word co-occurrence network was constructed to analyze the relationship between keywords and social network analysis (SNA) was utilized. We divided the data into three periods to investigate the periodic changes and trends in discussion of WoM. SNA showed that Period 1 (1941~2008) consisted of clusters regarding relationship, source, and consumers. Period 2 (2009~2013) contained clusters of satisfaction, community, social networks, review, and internet. Clusters of period 3 (2014~2018) involved satisfaction, medium, review, and interview. The periodic changes of clusters showed transition from offline to online WoM. Media of WoM have become an important factor in spreading the words. This study conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on scholarly big data regarding WoM. The main contribution of this study is that it provides a micro perspective on the research trend of WoM as well as the macro perspective. The limitation of this study is that the citation network constructed in this study is a network based on the direct citation relation of the collected documents for MPA.