• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.23 no.3
• /
• pp.1-27
• /
• 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
• /
• v.25 no.3
• /
• pp.63-88
• /
• 2019

The goal of this paper is to investigate changes in North Korea's domestic and foreign policies through automated text analysis over North Korea represented in South Korean mass media. Based on that data, we then analyze the status of text mining research, using a text mining technique to find the topics, methods, and trends of text mining research. We also investigate the characteristics and method of analysis of the text mining techniques, confirmed by analysis of the data. In this study, R program was used to apply the text mining technique. R program is free software for statistical computing and graphics. Also, Text mining methods allow to highlight the most frequently used keywords in a paragraph of texts. One can create a word cloud, also referred as text cloud or tag cloud. This study proposes a procedure to find meaningful tendencies based on a combination of word cloud, and co-occurrence networks. This study aims to more objectively explore the images of North Korea represented in South Korean newspapers by quantitatively reviewing the patterns of language use related to North Korea from 2016. 11. 1 to 2019. 5. 23 newspaper big data. In this study, we divided into three periods considering recent inter - Korean relations. Before January 1, 2018, it was set as a Before Phase of Peace Building. From January 1, 2018 to February 24, 2019, we have set up a Peace Building Phase. The New Year's message of Kim Jong-un and the Olympics of Pyeong Chang formed an atmosphere of peace on the Korean peninsula. After the Hanoi Pease summit, the third period was the silence of the relationship between North Korea and the United States. Therefore, it was called Depression Phase of Peace Building. This study analyzes news articles related to North Korea of the Korea Press Foundation database(www.bigkinds.or.kr) through text mining, to investigate characteristics of the Kim Jong-un regime's South Korea policy and unification discourse. The main results of this study show that trends in the North Korean national policy agenda can be discovered based on clustering and visualization algorithms. In particular, it examines the changes in the international circumstances, domestic conflicts, the living conditions of North Korea, the South's Aid project for the North, the conflicts of the two Koreas, North Korean nuclear issue, and the North Korean refugee problem through the co-occurrence word analysis. It also offers an analysis of South Korean mentality toward North Korea in terms of the semantic prosody. In the Before Phase of Peace Building, the results of the analysis showed the order of 'Missiles', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', 'Unification', and ' South-North Korean'. The results of Peace Building Phase are extracted the order of 'Panmunjom', 'Unification', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', and 'Military'. The results of Depression Phase of Peace Building derived the order of 'North Korea Nuclear', 'North and South Korea', 'Missile', 'State Department', and 'International'. There are 16 words adopted in all three periods. The order is as follows: 'missile', 'North Korea Nuclear', 'Diplomacy', 'Unification', 'North and South Korea', 'Military', 'Kaesong Industrial Complex', 'Defense', 'Sanctions', 'Denuclearization', 'Peace', 'Exchange and Cooperation', and 'South Korea'. We expect that the results of this study will contribute to analyze the trends of news content of North Korea associated with North Korea's provocations. And future research on North Korean trends will be conducted based on the results of this study. We will continue to study the model development for North Korea risk measurement that can anticipate and respond to North Korea's behavior in advance. We expect that the text mining analysis method and the scientific data analysis technique will be applied to North Korea and unification research field. Through these academic studies, I hope to see a lot of studies that make important contributions to the nation.