Abstract
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.
Web2.0의 등장과 함께 급속히 발전해온 온라인 포럼, 블로그, 트위터, 페이스북과 같은 소셜 미디어 서비스는 소비자와 소비자간의 의사소통을 넘어 이제 기업과 소비자 사이의 새로운 커뮤니케이션 매체로도 인식되고 있다. 때문에 기업뿐만 아니라 수많은 기관, 조직 등에서도 소셜미디어를 활용하여 소비자와 적극적인 의사소통을 전개하고 있으며, 나아가 소셜 미디어 콘텐츠에 담겨있는 소비자 고객들의 의견, 관심, 불만, 평판 등을 분석하고 이해하며 비즈니스에 적용하기 위해 이를 적극 분석하는 단계로 진화하고 있다. 이러한 연구의 한 분야로서 비정형 텍스트 콘텐츠와 같은 빅 데이터에서 저자의 감성이나 의견 등을 추출하는 오피니언 마이닝과 감성분석 기법이 소셜미디어 콘텐츠 분석에도 활발히 이용되고 있으며, 이미 여러 연구에서 이를 위한 방법론, 테크닉, 툴 등을 제시하고 있다. 그러나 아직 대량의 소셜미디어 데이터를 수집하여 언어처리를 거치고 의미를 해석하여 비즈니스 인사이트를 도출하는 전반의 과정을 제시한 연구가 많지 않으며, 그 결과를 의사결정자들이 쉽게 이해할 수 있는 시각화 기법으로 풀어내는 것 또한 드문 실정이다. 그러므로 본 연구에서는 소셜미디어 콘텐츠의 오피니언 마이닝을 위한 실무적인 분석방법을 제시하고 이를 통해 기업의사결정을 지원할 수 있는 시각화된 결과물을 제시하고자 하였다. 이를 위해 한국 인스턴트 식품 1위 기업의 대표 상품인 N-라면을 사례 연구의 대상으로 실제 블로그 데이터와 뉴스를 수집/분석하고 결과를 도출하였다. 또한 이런 과정에서 프리웨어 오픈 소스 R을 이용함으로써 비용부담 없이 어떤 조직에서도 적용할 수 있는 레퍼런스를 구현하였다. 그러므로 저자들은 본 연구의 분석방법과 결과물들이 식품산업뿐만 아니라 타 산업에서도 바로 적용 가능한 실용적 가이드와 참조자료가 될 것으로 기대한다.
