• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.89-105
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• 2014

After emergence of Internet, social media with highly interactive Web 2.0 applications has provided very user friendly means for consumers and companies to communicate with each other. Users have routinely published contents involving their opinions and interests in social media such as blogs, forums, chatting rooms, and discussion boards, and the contents are released real-time in the Internet. For that reason, many researchers and marketers regard social media contents as the source of information for business analytics to develop business insights, and many studies have reported results on mining business intelligence from Social media content. In particular, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, as a technique to extract, classify, understand, and assess the opinions implicit in text contents, are frequently applied into social media content analysis because it emphasizes determining sentiment polarity and extracting authors' opinions. A number of frameworks, methods, techniques and tools have been presented by these researchers. However, we have found some weaknesses from their methods which are often technically complicated and are not sufficiently user-friendly for helping business decisions and planning. In this study, we attempted to formulate a more comprehensive and practical approach to conduct opinion mining with visual deliverables. First, we described the entire cycle of practical opinion mining using Social media content from the initial data gathering stage to the final presentation session. Our proposed approach to opinion mining consists of four phases: collecting, qualifying, analyzing, and visualizing. In the first phase, analysts have to choose target social media. Each target media requires different ways for analysts to gain access. There are open-API, searching tools, DB2DB interface, purchasing contents, and so son. Second phase is pre-processing to generate useful materials for meaningful analysis. If we do not remove garbage data, results of social media analysis will not provide meaningful and useful business insights. To clean social media data, natural language processing techniques should be applied. The next step is the opinion mining phase where the cleansed social media content set is to be analyzed. The qualified data set includes not only user-generated contents but also content identification information such as creation date, author name, user id, content id, hit counts, review or reply, favorite, etc. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, researchers or data analysts can select a suitable mining tool. Topic extraction and buzz analysis are usually related to market trends analysis, while sentiment analysis is utilized to conduct reputation analysis. There are also various applications, such as stock prediction, product recommendation, sales forecasting, and so on. The last phase is visualization and presentation of analysis results. The major focus and purpose of this phase are to explain results of analysis and help users to comprehend its meaning. Therefore, to the extent possible, deliverables from this phase should be made simple, clear and easy to understand, rather than complex and flashy. To illustrate our approach, we conducted a case study on a leading Korean instant noodle company. We targeted the leading company, NS Food, with 66.5% of market share; the firm has kept No. 1 position in the Korean "Ramen" business for several decades. We collected a total of 11,869 pieces of contents including blogs, forum contents and news articles. After collecting social media content data, we generated instant noodle business specific language resources for data manipulation and analysis using natural language processing. In addition, we tried to classify contents in more detail categories such as marketing features, environment, reputation, etc. In those phase, we used free ware software programs such as TM, KoNLP, ggplot2 and plyr packages in R project. As the result, we presented several useful visualization outputs like domain specific lexicons, volume and sentiment graphs, topic word cloud, heat maps, valence tree map, and other visualized images to provide vivid, full-colored examples using open library software packages of the R project. Business actors can quickly detect areas by a swift glance that are weak, strong, positive, negative, quiet or loud. Heat map is able to explain movement of sentiment or volume in categories and time matrix which shows density of color on time periods. Valence tree map, one of the most comprehensive and holistic visualization models, should be very helpful for analysts and decision makers to quickly understand the "big picture" business situation with a hierarchical structure since tree-map can present buzz volume and sentiment with a visualized result in a certain period. This case study offers real-world business insights from market sensing which would demonstrate to practical-minded business users how they can use these types of results for timely decision making in response to on-going changes in the market. We believe our approach can provide practical and reliable guide to opinion mining with visualized results that are immediately useful, not just in food industry but in other industries as well.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.183-203
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• 2018

News articles are the most suitable medium for examining the events occurring at home and abroad. Especially, as the development of information and communication technology has brought various kinds of online news media, the news about the events occurring in society has increased greatly. So automatically summarizing key events from massive amounts of news data will help users to look at many of the events at a glance. In addition, if we build and provide an event network based on the relevance of events, it will be able to greatly help the reader in understanding the current events. In this study, we propose a method for extracting event networks from large news text data. To this end, we first collected Korean political and social articles from March 2016 to March 2017, and integrated the synonyms by leaving only meaningful words through preprocessing using NPMI and Word2Vec. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling was used to calculate the subject distribution by date and to find the peak of the subject distribution and to detect the event. A total of 32 topics were extracted from the topic modeling, and the point of occurrence of the event was deduced by looking at the point at which each subject distribution surged. As a result, a total of 85 events were detected, but the final 16 events were filtered and presented using the Gaussian smoothing technique. We also calculated the relevance score between events detected to construct the event network. Using the cosine coefficient between the co-occurred events, we calculated the relevance between the events and connected the events to construct the event network. Finally, we set up the event network by setting each event to each vertex and the relevance score between events to the vertices connecting the vertices. The event network constructed in our methods helped us to sort out major events in the political and social fields in Korea that occurred in the last one year in chronological order and at the same time identify which events are related to certain events. Our approach differs from existing event detection methods in that LDA topic modeling makes it possible to easily analyze large amounts of data and to identify the relevance of events that were difficult to detect in existing event detection. We applied various text mining techniques and Word2vec technique in the text preprocessing to improve the accuracy of the extraction of proper nouns and synthetic nouns, which have been difficult in analyzing existing Korean texts, can be found. In this study, the detection and network configuration techniques of the event have the following advantages in practical application. First, LDA topic modeling, which is unsupervised learning, can easily analyze subject and topic words and distribution from huge amount of data. Also, by using the date information of the collected news articles, it is possible to express the distribution by topic in a time series. Second, we can find out the connection of events in the form of present and summarized form by calculating relevance score and constructing event network by using simultaneous occurrence of topics that are difficult to grasp in existing event detection. It can be seen from the fact that the inter-event relevance-based event network proposed in this study was actually constructed in order of occurrence time. It is also possible to identify what happened as a starting point for a series of events through the event network. The limitation of this study is that the characteristics of LDA topic modeling have different results according to the initial parameters and the number of subjects, and the subject and event name of the analysis result should be given by the subjective judgment of the researcher. Also, since each topic is assumed to be exclusive and independent, it does not take into account the relevance between themes. Subsequent studies need to calculate the relevance between events that are not covered in this study or those that belong to the same subject.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

It is known that the economic sentiment index and macroeconomic indicators are closely related because economic agent's judgment and forecast of the business conditions affect economic fluctuations. For this reason, consumer sentiment or confidence provides steady fodder for business and is treated as an important piece of economic information. In Korea, private consumption accounts and consumer sentiment index highly relevant for both, which is a very important economic indicator for evaluating and forecasting the domestic economic situation. However, despite offering relevant insights into private consumption and GDP, the traditional approach to measuring the consumer confidence based on the survey has several limits. One possible weakness is that it takes considerable time to research, collect, and aggregate the data. If certain urgent issues arise, timely information will not be announced until the end of each month. In addition, the survey only contains information derived from questionnaire items, which means it can be difficult to catch up to the direct effects of newly arising issues. The survey also faces potential declines in response rates and erroneous responses. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to complement it. For this purpose, we construct and assess an index designed to measure consumer economic sentiment index using sentiment analysis. Unlike the survey-based measures, our index relies on textual analysis to extract sentiment from economic and financial news articles. In particular, text data such as news articles and SNS are timely and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. There exist two main approaches to the automatic extraction of sentiment from a text, we apply the lexicon-based approach, using sentiment lexicon dictionaries of words annotated with the semantic orientations. In creating the sentiment lexicon dictionaries, we enter the semantic orientation of individual words manually, though we do not attempt a full linguistic analysis (one that involves analysis of word senses or argument structure); this is the limitation of our research and further work in that direction remains possible. In this study, we generate a time series index of economic sentiment in the news. The construction of the index consists of three broad steps: (1) Collecting a large corpus of economic news articles on the web, (2) Applying lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis of each article to score the article in terms of sentiment orientation (positive, negative and neutral), and (3) Constructing an economic sentiment index of consumers by aggregating monthly time series for each sentiment word. In line with existing scholarly assessments of the relationship between the consumer confidence index and macroeconomic indicators, any new index should be assessed for its usefulness. We examine the new index's usefulness by comparing other economic indicators to the CSI. To check the usefulness of the newly index based on sentiment analysis, trend and cross - correlation analysis are carried out to analyze the relations and lagged structure. Finally, we analyze the forecasting power using the one step ahead of out of sample prediction. As a result, the news sentiment index correlates strongly with related contemporaneous key indicators in almost all experiments. We also find that news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity in most cases. In almost all experiments, the news sentiment index strongly correlates with related contemporaneous key indicators. Furthermore, in most cases, news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity; in head-to-head comparisons, the news sentiment measures outperform survey-based sentiment index as CSI. Policy makers want to understand consumer or public opinions about existing or proposed policies. Such opinions enable relevant government decision-makers to respond quickly to monitor various web media, SNS, or news articles. Textual data, such as news articles and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and blogs) are generated at high-speeds and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. Although research using unstructured data in economic analysis is in its early stages, but the utilization of data is expected to greatly increase once its usefulness is confirmed.

• 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.28 no.1
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• pp.155-174
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• 2022

From January 2020 to October 2021, more than 500,000 academic studies related to COVID-19 (Coronavirus-2, a fatal respiratory syndrome) have been published. The rapid increase in the number of papers related to COVID-19 is putting time and technical constraints on healthcare professionals and policy makers to quickly find important research. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method of extracting useful information from text data of extensive literature using LDA and Word2vec algorithm. Papers related to keywords to be searched were extracted from papers related to COVID-19, and detailed topics were identified. The data used the CORD-19 data set on Kaggle, a free academic resource prepared by major research groups and the White House to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, updated weekly. The research methods are divided into two main categories. First, 41,062 articles were collected through data filtering and pre-processing of the abstracts of 47,110 academic papers including full text. For this purpose, the number of publications related to COVID-19 by year was analyzed through exploratory data analysis using a Python program, and the top 10 journals under active research were identified. LDA and Word2vec algorithm were used to derive research topics related to COVID-19, and after analyzing related words, similarity was measured. Second, papers containing 'vaccine' and 'treatment' were extracted from among the topics derived from all papers, and a total of 4,555 papers related to 'vaccine' and 5,971 papers related to 'treatment' were extracted. did For each collected paper, detailed topics were analyzed using LDA and Word2vec algorithms, and a clustering method through PCA dimension reduction was applied to visualize groups of papers with similar themes using the t-SNE algorithm. A noteworthy point from the results of this study is that the topics that were not derived from the topics derived for all papers being researched in relation to COVID-19 (