• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.25-41
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• 2014

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.