• Information Systems Review
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.147-163
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• 2021

We investigate the effect of comment history disclosure on portal news comments. Specifically, based on the scraped news comments from Naver and Daum (two leading Korean news portals), we employ the difference-in-differences estimator to empirically tease out the impact of the comment history disclosure policy implemented in Naver on its news comments. Our result shows that the policy implementation significantly increased the length and the positiveness of online news comments but did not affect their quality.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.303-327
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• 2021

Purpose The online comments on news content have become social information and are understood based on deliberative democracy. Although the related research has focused on the relationship between online comments and their deliberative quality, the social information provided by online comments consists of not only direct information such as comments themselves but also indirect information such as 'likes' and 'dislikes'. Therefore, the research on online comments and deliberative quality should study this direct and indirect information together, and the direction and the degree of the indirect information should be also considered with them. Design/methodology/approach This study distinguishes comments by the attached 'likes' and 'dislikes', identifies highly supported and highly unsupported comments by the intensity of 'likes' and 'dislikes', and investigates the relationship between their existence and the deliberative quality measured as the topic diversity. Then, we applied topic modeling to the 2,390 news articles and their 74,385 comments collected from five news sites. Findings The topic diversities of the supported and unsupported comments are related to the topic diversity of all comments but the degree of the relationship is higher in the case of supported comments. Furthermore, the existence of highly supported and unsupported comments is led to less diversity of all comments compared to the case where those comments are absent. Particularly, when only highly supported comments are present, topic diversity was lower than in the opposite case.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.159-176
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• 2015

As a public medium and one of the big data sources that is accumulated informally and real time, online news comments or replies are considered a significant resource to understand mentalities of article readers. The comments are also being regarded as an important medium of WOM (Word of Mouse) about products, services or the enterprises. If the diffusing effect of the comments is referred to as the degrees of agreement and disagreement from an angle of WOM, figuring out which characteristics of the comments would influence the agreements or the disagreements to the comments in very early stage would be very worthwhile to establish a comment-based eWOM (electronic WOM) strategy. However, investigating the effects of the characteristics of the comments on eWOM effect has been rarely studied. According to this angle, this study aims to conduct an empirical analysis which understands the characteristics of comments that affect the numbers of agreement and disagreement, as eWOM performance, to particular news articles which address a specific product, service or enterprise per se. While extant literature has focused on the quantitative attributes of the comments which are collected by manually, this paper used text mining techniques to acquire the qualitative attributes of the comments in an automatic and cost effective manner.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.19 no.8
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• pp.1489-1497
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• 2018

The importance of comments is constantly growing as a participation of individual in Online News that being invigorated. The 'Best Comments', which strongly related by major participants are recognized as a primary public opinion, and obtains the power. Thus this study is aimed to analyze the characteristics of the 'Best Comments' by utilizing the data of comments on Online News. For this study, a possible element that may reveal the difference between 'general' comments and 'best' comments were set up, digitalized the data, and examined the difference between 'general' and 'best' comments. This study is expected to provide a clue for the problematic issues, such as 'online comment rigged scandal' in recent; also as a basic data that subjected by the individual, academic society, government, and etc.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.163-184
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• 2020

The information on SNS, which is created by the forms of postings and comments, is being magnified and redistributed to news media expanding its impacts on real words. This amplifying effects of SNS comments have been increasingly discussed but there still lacks the answers for which dimensions of information is magnified, and what affects the direction and the degree of the amplification. This study, therefore, explores the detailed dimensions that are magnified by SNS comments and how SNS posting structure and social network characteristics affect them by using sentiment analysis. By analyzing 2,378 Facebook postings and news articles and their 26,312 SNS and 74,730 news site comments, this study shows that SNS comments magnify the sentiments of the posting articles they are attached to. In comparison to news site comments, SNS comments magnify the cognitive and social dimensions more than the news site comments. In the affective dimension, they tend to magnify only the positive emotion more than news site comments. Also, the findings reveal that whether the article in the posting is written by the posting owner affects the degree of amplification when the comments are remained positive or switched positive, while the opposite determines the amplification when comments remain negatively, suggesting that the user relationship in social network is the important factor that affects the direction and the degree of the information amplification in SNS.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.871-879
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• 2010

In this paper, we present a system that classifies comments on a news article into a user opinion called a polarity (positive or negative). The system is a kind of document classification system for comments and is based on machine learning techniques like support vector machine. Unlike normal documents, comments have their body that can influence classifying their opinions as polarities. In this paper, we propose a feature weighting scheme using such characteristics of comments and several resources for opinion classification. Through our experiments, the weighting scheme have turned out to be useful for opinion classification in comments on Korean news articles. Also Korean character n-grams (bigram or trigram) have been revealed to be helpful for opinion classification in comments including lots of Internet words or typos. In the future, we will apply this scheme to opinion analysis of comments of product reviews as well as news articles.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.391-406
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• 2015

As the individual participation in online news sites proliferates, the importance of online news comments has been increasing. Social comment services which help people leave comments on news articles using their own SNS (social networking site) accounts have gained popularity recently. Using data gathered from an online news site, this study, therefore, (1) identifies factors differentiating social comments from general comments, (2) examines how social comments are significantly different from general comments in terms of each factor, (3) and further validates how the social comments' characteristics vary among different type of SNS. Then, we investigated this study by applying t-test, ANOVA, and Duncan test of SPSS Statistics. Our results provide insights on the significant differences in all the factors between general and social comments. We also found that there is a significant difference between Facebook and Twitter groups among three types of SNS. The findings of this study would help assess the actual benefit of social comment services as they may provide us with several valuable leads to solve the malicious comments issue. Moreover, they would suggest the need to apply this service to other areas, such as online environments in private and public sectors.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.173-187
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• 2012

As newspapers which have been major news media are being replaced by on-line news media in recent years, many researchers are paying attention to "comments(news users' short remarks on an article)", a newly emerged way of forming public opinion. This study is examining how the similarity between political disposition of on-line news visitors and that of news media impacts upon their evaluation on quality of comments from the viewpoint of 'social identity theory.' This study may have academic significance because it inspected the pattern of media usage and the cognition of comments in relation to political disposition for the first time and showed 'comments reading' and the function of comments to form public opinion(comments journalism).

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.177-190
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• 2023

Purpose Recently, as a new business marketing tool, short form content focused on fun and interest has been shared as hashtags. By extracting positive and negative keywords from media audiences through comment analysis of social media news, various stakeholders aim to quickly and easily grasp users' opinions on major news. Design/methodology/approach YouTube videos were searched using the YouTube Data API and the results were collected. Video comments were crawled and implemented as HTML elements, and the collection results were checked on the web page. The collected data consisted of video thumbnails, titles, contents, and comments. Comments were word tokenized with the R program, comparing positive and negative dictionaries, and then quantifying polarity. In addition, social network analysis was conducted using divided positive and negative comments, and the results of centrality analysis and visualization were confirmed. Findings Social media users' opinions on issue news were confirmed by analyzing and visualizing the centrality of keywords through social network analysis by dividing comments into positive and negative. As a result of the analysis, it was found that negative objective reviews had the highest effect on information usefulness. In this way, previous studies have been reaffirmed that online negative information has a strong effect on personal decision-making. Corporate marketers will analyze user comments on social network services (SNS) to detect negative opinions about products or corporate images, which will serve as an opportunity to satisfy customers' needs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.434-445
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• 2015

In reading news stories online, people are exposed to others' comments to a news story. In spite of popularity of comments to a news story online, the understanding of why and who posts a comment is still lacking. To complement scarcity and have a better understanding of comment-posting online, this study examined psychological factors which affect the likelihood of posting a comment to a news story online. In particular, three variables were considered: The first variable was communication efficacy, that is, an individual's belief about communication practices and systems, under the supposition that the people who have greater levels of communication efficacy are more likely to post a comment. The second variable was perception of public opinion, to test that when and if people judge their position of the issue as favored by the majority, they tend to post a comment. And finally, the tone of existing comments was included, to test if the tone of comments affects the willingness to post a comment. The results showed that firstly, people at a high level of communication efficacy are more likely to post a comment compared to people at the low level of communication efficacy. Secondly, the perception of public opinion partly influenced the willingness to post a comment. Especially, when people believe communication systems contribute to develop society and also when judged that their opinion is the majority's opinion, they are more likely to post a comment. Finally, the tone of the comments influenced the willingness to post a comment only on the condition that people are confident of the communication practice and are exposed to emotional comments.